Davis McCombs, a Yale Younger Poets Award winner selected by W.S. Merwin, directs the Creative Writing Program at the University of Arkansas. He attended Harvard University, the University of Virginia (MFA) and Stanford University as a Wallace Stenger Fellow. He is the recipient of fellowships from the Ruth Lily Poetry Foundation, the Kentucky Arts Council, and the National Endowment for the Arts. His work has appeared in Best American Poetry 1996, The Missouri Review, and Hayden's Ferry Review.

Books by Davis McCombs: Dismal Rock, Ultima Thule

About Dismal Rock:

"This beautiful book records the sacraments of labor and the dark equivocations of history in a single swath of tobacco land in south central Kentucky. With infinite patience and luminous particularity, Davis McCombs unearths the traces of those-who-have-passed-before-us through the material world. How rare it is to encounter a writer — to encounter any human being — who finds the world more compelling than the self. McCombs is just such a paragon. And his poems have the weight of psalms."
—Linda Gregerson

"I'm deeply impressed by the superb "Tobacco Mosaic." Generations of proud humane craft have been transmutted into these wonderful elegies. Tobacco is unlikely ever to get a kinder memorial."
—Les Murray

"Reading Davis McCombs, I have the sense that finally here is a young poet with the talent and character, the mythic vision, to take up the challenge thrown down by Walt Whitman and never quite met by any twentieth century American poet. Twenty-first century poety may well look forward to a body of work that, in its exploration of a very specific place, elucidates the universal. In Dismal Rock, as well as in his brilliant debut, Ultima Thule, McCombs manages to makes the 'new world,' which for so long now has felt battered, exhausted, and used-up, feel new again—holy and terrible and wondrous."
—Aleda Shirley