North Dakota's Honored Poets

North Dakota’s Poets Laureate
Larry Woiwode  (1995–present)
Lydia Jackson  (1975-1982)
Henry Martinson  (1973-1974)
Corbin Waldron  (1957-1972)
James W. Foley, Jr.  (1874 -1939)
unofficial poet laureate
North Dakota Centennial Poet, 1989
  David Solheim

List of Poets and Their Works

Beard, Michael, translator  
Professor of English at the University of North Dakota, Beard is also a translator of  Middle Eastern poetry and co-editor of Middle Eastern Literatures incorporating Edebiyât  and the book Walking with the Wind by Abbas Kiarostami (translated from Persian and co-edited with Ahmad Karimi-Hakkak, 2002). 

Beede, Aaron McGaffey
Toward the Sun (1916)
Self Sloughed-Off Person Free (1934)

Bjarnason,  Paul  (Icelandic translator and poet)
Odes and Echoes  (1954)
More Echoes  (1963)
Fleygar (1953, in Icelandic)
Flisar (1964, in Icelandic)

Bliss, Paul Southworth 
Spin Dance and Spring Comes to Shaw's Garden (Lakeside, 1934)
Cirrus from the West, with wood engravings by Harold J. Mathews (Lakeside Press, 1935)
The Rye is The Sea:  A Book of Poems. Together with a prose account of the author’s experiences as a novice hunter and angler entitled:  Hunting Begins At Forty and Fishing At Forty (The Cirrus Company, 1936).
Poems of Places  (The Cirrus Company, 1937).  
 
Borner, Florence 
Modern Poems for Modern People  (1919)

Camrud, Madelyn
A Greener Green, A Bluer Blue (1983)
This House is Filled with Cracks (1994)
The Light We Go After (Dacotah Territory Press)

Crow, Barbara  
Coming Up for Light and Air (New Rivers Press, 1995)

Czerwiec, Heidi
Hiking the Maze (Finishing Line Press, 2009)

Dreps, Hildegarde Fried
Oars in Silver Water and Other Poems (1961)

Duggan, F. J., M.D.
Infinity or Nature’s God  (1909)

Foley, James W., Jr.
A Little Book of Prairie Breezes (1902)
Two Outdoor Plays (1925)
Songs of Schooldays (1909)
Songs with Silver Linings (1910)
Boys and Girls, Plains and Prairie, Life and Laughter (1911)
The Verses of James W. Foley: Book of Life and Laughter (1911)
Old Friends like You (1914)
The Mellow Year (1921)
Just for Fun Verses (1923)
With Happiness to You (1928)

Ford, Deborah 
Brush strokes: Poems (Singular Speech Press, 1990)
A Kind of Heaven: Poems of Vietnam  (34 poems)

Heffernan, Mrs. John
Poems of Home Life  (1912)

Henry, Gordon, Jr.  
His work appears in Traces in Blood, Bone and Stone:
Contemporary Ojibwe Poetry (2006), Songs from This Earth on Turtle's Back: Contemporary American Indian Poetry (1983) and Returning the Gift: Poetry and Prose from the First Native American Writers (1994).  
 
Jacobson, Dale   
Dakota Incantations (1973)
Poems for Goya’s “Disparates” (1980)
Shouting at Midnight (1986)
Blues for Tom McGrath (1991)
Factories and Cities: A Poem in Two Parts (2003)
A Walk by the River: A Long Poem (2004)
Exile in My Homeland (2005)

Jackson, Lydia
Selected Poems (1962)
Rhymes for Every Season (1943)
Pardon My Gaff (1965)
A Peace Garden of Verses  (1967)
A Trilogy Trimmed in Lace (1984, posthumously)

Janzen, Rhoda
Babel's Stair (2006).

Julius, Kristjan Niels  (1860-1936)
Born in Iceland, K. N. Julius emigrated to North America in 1878 and moved to Thingvalla Township, in northeastern North Dakota about 1894.  He wrote satirical light-verse, often describing the immigrant’s plight in understanding English and was well known in both Iceland and the United States.  A monument to Julius near the destroyed Thingvalla Church near Mountain, North Dakota, still survives. 

Lowman, Bill
Riders of the Leafy Spurge  (1985)
The Blueberry Road  (1986)
Walk a Mile in My Bones (1988)

Lyons, Richard E. 
Poetry North: Five Poets of North Dakota (1970, editor)
Racer and Lame (1975, editor)
Scanning the Land  (1980, editor)
Stackers of Wheat  (1951, co-authored with Prudence Sand)
Men and Tin Kettles (1956)     
One Squeaking Straw  (1958)
Paintings in Taxicabs  (1965)
Above Time  (1968)

Marquart, Debra
Everything’s a Verb  (New Rivers Press, 1995)
From Sweetness  (Pearl Editions, 2001)

Martinson, David Keith 
Bleeding the Radiator (1974)

Martinson, Henry
Old Trails . . . and New (1958)
Funny Stories in Verse (n.d.)

Marzolf, Arnold H.
Faith Amid Despair in Poetry and Prayer  (1966)
Prairie Poems:  Poetic Dreams of Prairie Themes (1974)  

Masters, Janelle

Nelson, Rodney 
Good Clean Fun (1989)

Norstog, Jon
Yggdrasil (Christiania) (1902, in Nowegian)
 
Piehl, Shadd
His work appears in Towards Horses: Poems (Aluminum Canoe, 1999)

Ratchenski, Carol Kapaun
A Beautiful Hell (New Rivers Press, 2016) 
A Certain Kind of Forgiveness (Meadowlark, 2019)

Solheim,  David
On the Ward (1975)
Inheritance (1987)
West River: 100 Poems (1989)

Featured North Dakota Poets
and Their Works

HEID ELLEN ERDRICH

Born in Wahpeton, North Dakota; her featured work, National Monuments, won the Minnesota Poetry Award for 2009.


Fishing for Myth (New Rivers Press)
The Mother’s Tongue (Salt Publishing, 2005)
National Monuments (Michigan State Univ. Press, 2009)
Cell Traffic: New and Selected Poems (2012) 

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LOUISE ERDRICH

Raised in Wahpeton, North Dakota; her featured work of poetry is Original Fire (2003). Louise Erdrich won the 2012 National Book Award for her novel, The Round House.

Jacklight  (1984)
Baptism of Desire (1989)
Original Fire (2003)

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ROLAND FLINT

Born in Park River, North Dakota, in 1931; graduate of the University of North Dakota;  named poet laureate of Maryland 1995-2000.  Featured work is Easy: Poems (1999).

And Morning (1975)
The  Honey and Other Poems for Rosalind (1976)
Say It  (1979)
Resuming  Green: Selected Poems, 1965-1982  (1983)
Sicily (1987)
Stubborn  (1990)
Hearing Voices  (1991)
Pigeon (1991)
Pigeon in the Night (1994)
Easy:  Poems  (1999)

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CLELL GANNON

Nebraska-born, but raised in Underwood, North Dakota, and lived his adult life in Bismarck; was known for his visual art and poetry.  Featured work is Ever and Always I Shall Love the Land.

Songs of the Bunch-Grass Acres   (1924)
How Christmas Came to North Dakota  (1929)  
Ever and Always I Shall Love the Land  (1965)  

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MADELINE GLEASON

Madeline Gleason was born and grew up in Fargo, North Dakota; lived in San Francisco; died in 1979.  Gleason's  featured work is Collected Poems:  1944-1979 (1983).

Poems (1944)
The Metaphysical Needle (1949)
Concerto for Bell and Telephone (1966)
Selected Poems  (1972)
Here Comes Everybody (1975)
Collected Poems: 1944-1979 (1983, posthumously)

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ROBERT KING

Dr. King taught at the University of North Dakota in Grand Forks 1968-1996; he now directs the Colorado Poets Project in Greeley, Colorado.  Featured work is Old Man Laughing.

​Standing Around Outside (1970)
A Circle of Land (1990)
Learning American (1998)
Naming Names (2001)
What It Was Like  (2003)
Old Man Laughing (Ghost Road Press, 2007)

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THOMAS MCGRATH

Born in 1916 in Ransom County, near Sheldon, North Dakota, McGrath  is a well-known master of the long poem.  Featured work is Letter to an Imaginary Friend (1962) with the line, "Dakota is everywhere."
Letter to an Imaginary Friend (Swallow, 1962; Parts I & II, Swallow, 1970; Copper Canyon Press, 1985, 1997)
The Movie at the End of the World: Collected Poems  (1973)
Passages Toward the Dark (1982)
Letter to an Imaginary Friend, Parts Three and Four (1985)
New and Selected Poems (1964)

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JAY MEEK

Dr. Meek taught in the English Department at the University of North Dakota in Grand Forks from 1984 until his retirement in 2004. He died in 2007 of Alzheimer's Disease. Featured work is Good Lives. 



Stations (Carnegie Mellon Univ. Press, 1989)
Windows (Carnegie Mellon Univ. Press, 1994)
Good Lives (Dacotah Prairie Chapbook, 1996)
Prairie Volcano: An Anthology of North Dakota Writing (Dacotah Territory Press, 1995; editor with his wife, Martha Meek)

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TIMOTHY MURPHY

Born in Minnesota but a long-time resident of Fargo, North Dakota, Murphy writes sensitively of the pleasures and beauty of the outdoors, especially through his hunting experiences with a beloved dog.  Featured work is Mortal Stakes and Faint Thunder.
​
The Deed of Gift  (1998)
Very Far North  (2002)
Mortal Stakes and Faint Thunder (Dakota Institute Press, 2011)
Hunter's Log  (Dakota Institute Press, 2011)

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JAMIE PARSLEY

An Episcopalian priest from West Fargo, North Dakota, Parsley's poetry collections include a history of the terrible tornado in Fargo in 1957.  Featured work is Paper Doves, Falling and Other Poems (Sunstone, 1992).



The Loneliness Of Blizzards: Poems (Mellen, 1995)
Cloud: A Poem In 2 Acts (Mellen, 1997)
The Wounded Table: Poems (Pudding House, 1999)
Earth Into Earth, Water Into Water: Poems (Enso, 2000)
No Stars, No Moon: new and selected haiku (Mellen, 2004)
Ikon: Poems (Enso, 2005)
Just Once: Poems  (Loonfeather, 2007)
This Grass:  Poems (Enso, 2009)
Fargo, 1957:  An Elegy (poems) (ND Institute for Regional Studies, 2010)
Crow (Enso, 2012)

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AARON POOCHIGIAN

Aaron Poochigian grew up in Grand Forks, North Dakota, and returned home as a featured  author at the 2012 UND Writers Conference. His new book of poetry is The Cosmic Purr (Able Muse, 2012).

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MARNIE WALSH

Dakota native and Sioux writer, whose work is sometimes described as a precursor to Louise Erdrich, Walsh writes unflinchingly of Native American and reservation life.  Featured work is A Taste of the Knife: Poems (1976), with some of the poems set on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota.

MARK VINZ

Native of Rugby, North Dakota, Mark Vinz has retired after decades of teaching creative writing at Minnesota State University Moorhead.  He has published several collections of poetry and often reads his poems with two jazz musicians in a group that calls themselves “Just Friends." 

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