Email This PageDavid Swanger ’62
David Swanger ’62was recently selected as poet laureate of Santa Cruz County in central California. The honor is meant to allow an accomplished individual to share and promote poetry in the Santa Cruz County area. Swanger, a retired UC–Santa Cruz literature and philosophy professor, is no newcomer to poetry awards. The National Endowment for the Arts, as well as the California Arts Council, have awarded him fellowships in poetry. Wayne’s College of Beauty: New and Selected Poems, a collection of his poems, earned him the John Ciardi Prize for Poetry in 2005. His book was selected from more than 400 entries for the award that honors outstanding contemporary work. He is well published, with four books of poems, as well as books such as The Poem as a Process and Essays in Aesthetic Education. He also was a finalist in Fore Word’s Book of the Year Awards. Beyond these honors, a major moment in his distinguished career came when radio personality Garrison Keillor read “Patriarch on the Lake,” one of Swanger’s poems, on his National Public Radio show Writer’s Almanac. Swanger and wife Lynn have three grown children and live in Santa Cruz, Calif.
