William Notter has taught writing at Grand Valley State University and the University of Nevada, Reno, and is the author of the award-winning chapbook More Space Than Anyone Can Stand. He has received fellowships from the NEA, the Nevada Arts Council, and Sierra Arts Foundation. His poems have appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, AGNI Online, Ascent, The Chattahoochee Review, Connecticut Review, The Midwest Quarterly, Southern Poetry Review, Willow Springs, the anthology Good Poems for Hard Times, and on NPR’s The Writer’s Almanac.

Books by William Notter:

About Holding Everything Down:

"At once humorous, lyrical, dramatic, and reflective, the voice in these poems captures the jostling freedoms of personality in cinematic terms. The intimate lies down alongside the epic, the jocular shares the verdant field with the chthonic. Like all true works of art, Notter’s poems are had—in the manner we experience dreams, theater, or movies—not simply read. This auspicious first collection possesses originality and depth, attributes far rarer than talent and skill."
—Ricardo Pau-Llosa

"William Notter's descriptions of the natural world are delicate, gorgeous (‘a swollen, greasy moon,’ ‘watermelon dusk’), but it’s his feel for the people who inhabit his lines that ultimately makes this collection so memorable and real. In his poems we meet farmers and laborers and we learn about their longings, their hardships, their ‘nagging dreams.’ These are, in the end, deeply and authentically American poems. Like the coyotes one speaker listens for from her porch, Notter’s poems are thin, hungry, unexpected, and sly. A wonderful debut collection."
—Davis McCombs