Peter Ludwin
Peter Ludwin was born in Flushing, New York, and at the age of 5 moved west with his parents to Seattle. He went to high school in Portland, Oregon, served 28 months in the military in Bavaria and has also lived in Berkeley and Los Angeles, though he considers the greater Seattle area home. An English major when he attended the University of Washington, he is the recipient of numerous awards for his poetry, including a Literary Fellowship from Artist Trust and the W.D. Snodgrass Award for Endeavor and Excellence in Poetry. His first book, A Guest in All Your Houses, was published in 2009 by Word Walker Press. His second collection is Rumors of Fallible Gods, a two-time finalist for the Gival Press Poetry Award that was published in 2013 by Presa Press. His third book, Gone to Gold Mountain, was published in 2016 by Moon-Path Press and subsequently nominated for a Washington State Book Award. In 2017 the Before Columbus Foundation nominated it for an American Book Award. His most recent manuscript, Medicine Crow, was a finalist in both 2020 and 2021 for the Wandering Aengus Press Book Award.
A fourteen-year participant in Mexico’s San Miguel Poetry Week, where he has studied under such noted poets as Mark Doty, Tony Hoagland, Joseph Stroud and Robert Wrigley, Ludwin won The Comstock Review’s 2016 Muriel Craft Bailey Memorial Award, judged by Marge Piercy. That same year he was the Second Place winner of the Paulann Petersen Poetry Award, and a finalist in poetry for both the Tucson Festival of Books Literary Awards and the Pangaea Poetry Prize. A multiple Pushcart Prize nominee, he received nominations in 2016 from MoonPath Press and Connecticut River Review. Each of his books is a bit different stylistically from the others, though all address themes of history, culture and environment. Major influences include Theodore Roethke, Dylan Thomas, Rainer Maria Rilke, James Dickey, James Wright, Mark Doty, Joseph Stroud, Robert Wrigley and, especially in Rumors of Fallible Gods, Federico Garcia Lorca and Pablo Neruda.
His work has appeared in many journals, including Atlanta Review, The Bitter Oleander, The Comstock Review, Crab Orchard Review, Nimrod, North American Review and Prairie Schooner, to name a few. A world traveler who has journeyed by canoe to visit remote Indian families in the Amazon Basin of Ecuador, hiked in the Peruvian Andes, thumbed for rides in Greece, bargained for goods in the markets of Marrakech and Istanbul and survived debilitating illness in China and Tibet, Ludwin is also accomplished on acoustic blues guitar and autoharp. He currently lives in Kent, Washington, where he works in a greenhouse for a local nonprofit that helps immigrant farmers grow organic food for themselves and the community. He is
currently writing a memoir.
