Wayne Pounds

Wayne Pounds has lived in Japan forty years. Besides a stack of academic essays and monographs, he is the perpetrator of five chapbooks of poetry, a half dozen books of family history, and collections of stories about outlaws, some famous famous and the rest not. He has also written about the fate of black teachers in Oklahoma after desegregation cost most of them their jobs.

He was born in Oklahoma and grew up there and in northern California. He began his career as a poet in the 7th grade imitating Ogden Nash and his graduate career in the jungles of Vietnam keeping a low profile. PhDeed at the University of Kansas, 1976. Spends his best hours trying to keep up with his daughter, now a teenager. The books he is willing to own may be found at Amazon. For work in progress, see his blog.

The most recent collection of prose narratives ("stories") is TALES MY GRANDMOTHER NEVER TOLD ME, published in mid-2024. He has also published about Wright Cemetery in Chandler, Oklahoma. This is Chandler's oldest cemetery, with burials between 1891 and 1912, when the cemetery closed and was gradually abandoned. WRIGHT CEMETERY is a collection of biographies about the people buried there.A companion book is BELLCOW BALLADS, offering a new SPOON RIVER for the year 2020, allowing the dead speak from their graves.

Recent publications include: OKLAHOMA'S WHISKEY TOWNS 1889-1907 (2022); GHOST ROADS OF FALLIS OKLAHOMA AND OTHER TRAILS (2023); and TALES MY GRANDMOTHER NEVER TOLD ME (2024).