poet / educator / artist
Robin Walter (she/her/hers) was born in Colorado Springs, Colorado. She received a BA from Colorado College and an MFA from Colorado State University.
Walter is the author of Little Mercy (Graywolf Press, 2025), which was selected by Victoria Chang as the winner of the 2024 Academy of American Poets First Book Award. Her poetry and essays have been featured in American Poetry Review, Poets.org, Seneca Review, West Branch, Wildness and elsewhere.
Walter is an Assistant Professor at Colorado State University and lives in Fort Collins, Colorado. She has one well behaved dog (Banjo) and another poorly behaved dog (Fiddle).
“The beautiful and meditative poems in Little Mercy are painterly, showcasing a perceptive speaker with a keen eye. These poems quietly and gently ask us to look at all the natural beauty and cruelty (but mostly beauty) we face each day, every minute, every second of our strange time on this earth. They ask us to look again and again at the daily transparent beauties in the natural world. The first person speaker is the one asking us, but this person is barely in the poems, reminding me of the Chinese landscape paintings where the mountain is huge and the person is tiny in a corner. Nature in these paintings and in these poems is to be revered. There are small trumpets of beauty everywhere in these poems: ‘In the dry season, // timothy grass / comes into the sleeve // of its stem // & the creek slips // underground / without anyone’s // noticing.’ This isn’t entirely true because the speaker of these melodious and wise poems has noticed."
—Victoria Chang, 2024 Academy of American Poets First Book Award Judge
New York, NY (April 3, 2024)—Celebrated poet Victoria Chang has selected Robin Walter’s upcoming debut Little Mercy as the recipient of the 2024 Academy of American Poets’ First Book Award.
Walter’s manuscript will be published by Graywolf Press, a leading nonprofit publisher of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry in the United States, in April 2025. She will receive $5,000 plus a six-week residency at the Civitella Ranieri Center in Umbria, Italy. The Academy of American Poets will feature Walter’s poetry on Poets.org and in American Poets, its biannual members’ magazine which goes out to ten thousand readers and serves as a platform for new work by both upcoming and established poets. The Academy will also purchase thousands of copies of Little Mercy to send to its members, making it one of the most widely distributed poetry books of the year.
Published Works
Books:
Little Mercy, (Graywolf Press, 2025)
Selected Publications (Online):
“What Grammar for Prayer?” Academy of American Poets Poets.org
“—Watch” Academy of American Poets Poets.org
“—July prayer to survive the summer” Academy of American Poets Poets.org
9 poems Interim
“Measure” Wildness
“How far from here” Wildness
Selected Publications (Print):
Poetry publications have appeared in print in American Poetry Review, Driftwood Press Anthology, Seneca Review, West Branch, and elsewhere.
Honors & Awards
Civitella Rainieri Fellow, Umbria, Italy, 2025
Winner, Academy of American Poets First Book Award, 2024
Peter Taylor Fellow, Kenyon Review, Gambier, Ohio, 2024
Finalist, National Poetry Series, 2022