John Latta

Born in 1954 in Willow Run, Michigan, John Latta spent early childhood in the Pigeon River Country of northern lower Michigan, and later attended high school in Ann Arbor. He was educated at Cornell University (A.B.), the University of Virginia (MF.A.), and SUNY at Albany (Ph.D.). Since 1997 Latta has worked in Hatcher Graduate Library at the University of Michigan, in a variety of positions. Latta's first collection, Rubbing Torsos, was published by Ithaca House in 1979. A second collection, Breeze, won the Ernest Sandeen Prize in Poetry (selected by John Matthias) and was published in 2003 by the University of Notre Dame Press. Between 2006 and 2014 Latta kept a lively blog called Isola di Rifiuti.