Originally from New York, John Morgan moved to Fairbanks in 1976 to direct the creative writing program at the University of Alaska, where he has remained deeply rooted. He and his wife Nancy built a home overlooking the Tanana River, a landscape that has inspired much of his work. His two comprehensive collections, The Moving Out: Collected Early Poems (2019) and The Hungers of the World: New and Collected Later Poems, both published by Salmon Poetry, gather work from his six previous volumes alongside new poems. His poetry has appeared in the New Yorker, Poetry, the Paris Review, the American Poetry Review, the Kenyon Review, and Prairie Schooner, among many others.
Morgan’s work ranges widely- from intimate family poems to historical dramatic monologues to his long poem River of Light: A Conversation with Kabir, set on an Alaskan river journey. In 2009 he served as the first writer-in-residence at Denali National Park.
He studied with Robert Lowell at Harvard, where he won the Hatch Prize for Lyric Poetry, and with Donald Justice and Marvin Bell at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where he received the Academy of American Poets Prize. Additional honors include the Discovery Award of the New York Poetry Center and the Quarterly Review of Literature Poetry Prize. He and his wife now divide their time between Fairbanks and Bellingham, Washington.
Bio information sourced from John Morgan official website.