George Witte

Bio

George Witte is the author of four collections of poems: “An Abundance of Caution” (Unbound Edition Press, 2023), “Does She Have a Name?” (NYQ Books, 2014), “Deniability” (Orchises Press, January 2009), and “The Apparitioners” (Three Rail Press, 2005). His poems have been published in a range of magazines, including Antioch Review, Boulevard, Gettysburg Review, Hopkins Review, Ploughshares, Poetry, Southwest Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, and The Best American Poetry 2007. He received Poetry’s Frederick Bock prize for a group of poems and a fellowship from the New Jersey Council on the Arts. For thirty two years he has worked at St. Martin’s Press in New York, where he is now editor in chief, publishing literary and commercial fiction as well as nonfiction across a range of issues. He lives with his wife and their two daughters in Ridgewood, New Jersey. Visit him at https://georgewittepoet.com/

Full Name

George Witte

Locations

New York

Author's Timeline

2005

Literary Work

The Apparitioners: Poems
Three Rail Press
0-9760470-1-2
"The Apparitioners" is George Witte's first book of poetry, but you would never guess it from his confident, ironic style, which moves easily from colloquial speech-rhythms to rich natural description....Like a Frost of the suburbs, Mr. Witte regards the cozy, domesticated landscape he inhabits with an unsettling lucidity, which gives everything he sees the aspect of a parable or a warning....Anyone who has felt intimations of mortality in our American abundance will recognize the power of Mr. Witte's poems."--Adam Kirsch, New York Sun.

2009

Literary Work

Deniability: Poems
Orchises Press
978-1-932535-19-8
"That arch-citizen, Suspicious, who lived among Them in the Cold War, now lives among Us. Is Us now. We all feel the costs and compromises of living ordinary lives in a nation whose actions contradict its ideals, but naming those costs and compromises (the first step toward contesting them) is difficult when our linguistic well has been poisoned by pervasive lying. That is why, now as ever, now more than ever, we need poetry, and it is the challenge George Witte's Deniability accepts. From its first word, "uh-oh," to its last, "listen," Deniability shows us--commuters in "the tattooed N or R train / Eeling underground"--our lives, tenders us that clarity the absence of which "dispossesses our heirs by / failing," as our leaders and media have failed, "to record the deed.""--H. L. Hix, author of Chromatic.

2014

Literary Work

Does She Have a Name?
NYQ Books
1630450014 / 978-1630450014
Dramatic and intimate, the poems in Does She Have a Name? trace the journeys of two women-- one middle aged, the other her infant granddaughter--through near-mortal encounters with medical crises. "Witte has done something extraordinary here. At once terrifying and heartrending, Does She Have a Name? demonstrates unflinchingly that what lies at the heart of faith is love. It is a great and important work."--Frank Wilson, Philadelphia Inquirer

2023

Literary Work

An Abundance of Caution
Unbound Edition Press
0991378067 / 978-0991378067
"The poet's incredible attention to image, rhythm, and insistence upon the exact right word creates an incantatory sense of era-encapsulating collection of stylish, deftly composed poems." --Kirkus Reviews

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Author's Timeline

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