Born in Illinois, raised in Southern Indiana, and now living in St. Louis, Richard Newman is the author of the poetry collections Domestic Fugues (Steel Toe Books, 2009) and Borrowed Towns (Word Press, 2005), as well as several chapbooks, including Greatest Hits (Pudding House, 2002), Tastes Like Chicken and Other Meditations (Snark Publishing, 2004), Monster Gallery: 19 Terrifying and Amazing Monster Sonnets! (Snark Publishing, 2005), and 24 Tall Boys: Dark Verse for Light Times (Firecracker Press, 2007).

His poems, stories, and essays have appeared in Ted Kooser's "American Life in Poetry," Best American Poetry 2006, Boulevard, Crab Orchard Review, Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, The Writer's Almanac, StoryQuarterly, Tar River Poetry, The Sun, and many other periodicals and anthologies.

He earned his MFA at the Brief-Residency MFA Writing Program at Spalding University. He teaches at Washington University and University of Missouri-St. Louis Honors College, reviews books for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and, for the last 17 years, has served as editor of River Styx.  

He has been nominated for dozens of Pushcart prizes but has never won, not even once. He lives in St. Louis with his daughter Natalie and his wife Kara.

River Styx keeps on rolling
Richard Newman has spent the past thirteen years working to keep St. Louis' oldest literary magazine alive. It has not been an easy task. "Literature and poetry are never going to have a huge audience," concedes the 41-year-old editor of River Styx. "We're not in the checkout aisle of the grocery store — not that I expect that, but it would be fun." Read the rest of the article.

Richard's CV