Biography
Donald Platt is a poet born in Florida, the author of eight collections. His latest, Swansdown, dedicated to a beloved brother with Down’s syndrome, is part elegy and part compassionate study of life’s transitions and won the 2022 Off the Grid Poetry Prize. Platt’s previous collection, One Illuminated Letter of Being—“smart, beautifully conceived, and facing head on that which so many of us are unwilling to face,” wrote one reviewer—is a book-length sequence about his mother’s dying and death. Platt’s poems, lyrical, vital and full of fiercely specific details, have appeared in Poetry, Yale Review, Kenyon Review, Tin House, and Paris Review and The Best American Poetry, among scores of publications. He’s received two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and three Pushcart Prizes. Platt lives in Indiana and is a professor of English at Purdue University.