David Rivard

David Rivard was born in Fall River, Massachusetts. He earned a BA from the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth, and an MFA at the University of Arizona. With his first verse collection, Torque (1987), Rivard distinguished himself as a writer of volatile poems with striking imagery. In this work Rivard concentrates on working-class life. Fast automobiles, assembly lines, basketball games, and drug users are all used to tell the stories of childhood, relationships, and life that are prominent in Rivard’s work, along with an awareness of life’s hardships. Torque won the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize.

Rivard followed Torque with Wise Poison (1996), a collection of visceral, unsettling verses which won the Academy of American Poets’s James Laughlin Award and was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Rivard is also the author of Bewitched Playground (2000), Sugartown (2006), Otherwise Elsewhere (2011), and Standoff (2016), which was awarded a 2017 PEN / New England Award in Poetry. Rivard has received impressive recognition for his work. His other awards include the Celia B. Wagner Award from the Poetry Society of America, and grants from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts.

Rivard lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and he teaches in the MFA program at the University of New Hampshire.