Texas Book Festival honors poet Walt McDonald

TEXAS BOOK FESTIVAL HONORS POET WALT MCDONALD

Texas Tech University Press author Walt McDonald received the Bookend Award for a lifetime of contributions to Texas literature on Saturday, October 30, 2004, at the Texas Book Festival in Austin, Texas. The Bookend Awards Ceremony was held at the House Chamber, State Capitol. Author Larry L. King also received the honor.

Walt McDonald was an Air Force pilot, taught at the Air Force Academy, and served as Texas Poet Laureate in 2001. In May 2002, he retired from Texas Tech University as Paul Whitfield Horn Professor of English and Poet in Residence. Walt and his wife, Carol, are native Texans.

Walt has written twenty collections of poems and a book of fiction, including Great Lonely Places of the Texas Plains, A Band of Brothers: Stories from Vietnam, Whatever the Wind Delivers, and A Thousand Miles of Stars, all published by Texas Tech University Press. He has published more than 2,300 poems in journals, including American Poetry Review, The American Scholar, The Atlantic Monthly, London Review of Books, New York Review of Books, Poetry, The Sewanee Review, and The Southern Review. He has received six awards from the Texas Institute of Letters, including the Lon Tinkle Memorial Award for Excellence Sustained throughout a Career, in 2000.