David Alpaugh

David Alpaugh’s essay “The Professionalization of Poetry” was serialized in two issues of Poets & Writers Magazine in 2003. It drew over two hundred letters and emails and was widely discussed on the internet. Alpaugh’s poetry, fiction, drama and criticism have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including Exquisite Corpse, The Formalist, Modern Drama, Poetry, Twentieth Century Literature, The Literature of Work, and California Poetry from the Gold Rush to the Present. His collection Counterpoint won the Nicholas Roerich Poetry Prize from Story Line Press and his chapbooks have been published by Coracle Books and Pudding House Publications. A graduate of Rutgers University and the University of California, Berkeley, where he was a Woodrow Wilson and Ford Foundation fellow, Alpaugh operates Small Poetry Press, a chapbook design and printing service, and edits its Select Poets Series. He has taught at the U.C., Berkeley extension and hosts one of the San Francisco Bay Area’s most popular monthly poetry reading venues. He was a guest speaker at the Squaw Valley Community of Writers in 2003 and defended the controversial thesis of The Professionalization of Poetry at the AWP 2004 Convention in Chicago.


In Praise of Writer’s Block