Mark Irwin was born in Faribault, Minnesota, and has taught at Case Western Reserve, the University of Iowa, Ohio University, the University of Denver, the University of Colorado/Boulder, the University of Nevada, and Colorado College. The author of seven collections of poetry, he has won The Nation/Discovery Award, four Pushcart Prizes, National Endowment for the Arts and Ohio Art Council Fellowships, two Colorado Council for the Arts Fellowships, two Colorado Book Awards, the James Wright Poetry Award, and fellowships from the Fulbright, Lilly, and Wurlitzer Foundations. He lives in Colorado, and Los Angeles, where he teaches in the Graduate Creative Writing Program at the University of Southern California.
"Large White House Speaking is a book of startling marvels and terrible losses explored in poetry so sharp and bright it is song. Mark Irwin faces the world and brings it to these pages in strange imagery, high wire lines, with the precision of a surgeon. He is one of our best poets, and this is his best book yet."
—Laura Kasischke
"In this superb collection, Mark Irwin balances precision—each line has been carved into being with consummate care—against an enchanting and tonic strangeness, an adventurous commitment to the depths and reaches of metaphor. Few poets remain as faithful to the imagination where formal mastery always serves its vision. To read the poems here is to feel our lives 'luminous and ringing as the space grows larger.' Mark Irwin is a true original, and Large White House Speaking is his best book."
—Peter Campion
New Issues Poetry & Prose
