Harry Humes is the author of five collections of poetry, including Butterfly Effect (Milkweed Editions), selected by Pattiann Rogers as the 1998 National Poetry Series winner, The Bottomland and Ridge Music (University of Arkansas Press), and is an Associated Writing Programs Contest Finalist. Poetry Northwest awarded him its Theodore Roethke Poetry Prize for his poem “Calling in the Hawk,” and his poem “Butterfly Effect” was selected by James Tate for Best American Poetry of 1997. He is a recipient of a National Endowment Poetry Fellowship and several poetry grants from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts.

About August Evening with Trumpet:

"At the heart of Harry Humes’ best poems here and elsewhere is the boldly human way he walks through and inhabits the natural world. He never personifies there or falls for the pathetic fallacy because he knows enough to allow for the beauty of nature to emerge fully in all of its dangerous and harmonious ways. . . . This new book is marked by a clarity of words and of purpose that shimmers, and a stubborn and elegant insistence throughout that good words spoken well matter in our lives."
—Bruce Weigel, author of The Circle of Hanh: A Memoir and The Unraveling Strangeness: Poems

"Humes excavates a natural world ‘tangled in understory’ and creates a ‘sinewy fellowship’ between human beings and their fellow creatures. To that fellowship, Humes brings stories of ‘mismatched lives and turned-out pockets after all those years at Tastykake and Ford.’ Read this book for Humes’ animation of the coal breaker with its ‘blackened guts’ and his depiction of the father/son relationship forged in the ‘row house that leaned / to one side because of mine subsidence.’ I admire Humes’ spare, beautifully made lines and their restless, uneasy love for the people and things of this world."
—Robin Becker, author of The Horse Fair and All-American Girl