Ron Wallace
Official Website of Oklahoma Book Award winning author
ACCOLADES
“
"Ron Wallace invites us to his country where red-tailed hawks circle a landscape made real by the grace of his writing, writing that seems to come from his very soul. He is an
exciting new poetic voice in
American Poetry. What grace!"
Billie Letts
New York Times
Best Selling author
Wallace delivers unadorned poetic lines with natural and refreshingly unaffected power and precision. My use of the word "unadorned" belies the philosophical, emotional, and hard-earned reflections which radiate from his carefully crafted poems.
Larry Thomas
2008 Poet Laureate of Texas
Wallace delivers unadorned poetic lines with natural and refreshingly unaffected power and precision. My use of the word "unadorned" belies the philosophical, emotional, and hard-earned reflections which radiate from his carefully crafted poems.
Larry Thomas
2008 Poet Laureate of Texas
“
Usually, when someone uses the word "authentic", they are trying to sell you blue jeans or stolen antiquities, but I can think of no better word to describe the poetry of Ron Wallace. He is the real deal.
Benjamin Myers
2015-2016 Poet Laureate of Oklahoma
My father and mother have both written introductions to Ron's work. They called his writing "powerful" and beautiful and sensual and absolutely honest". Now I echo those sentiments and know Mom and Dad would be proud.
Tracy Letts
2008 Pulitzer Prize winner
for drama
Elegiac in the best sense of the word, Ron Wallace offers tender, dusty, elegance, composing family, heroes, and the poet himself into the song that is Oklahoma, a moving performance that will speak to many people everywhere.
Ken Hada
Professor and poet
2024 Oklahoma Book Award winner in poetry
“
Before my ashes to soot, dust to dirt moment, I can catch a ride in the comfort of Ron’s verse, back to a place on the far side of the wire to a free range of the mind. The past will be your constant companion, a shadow rider on the ridge that you couldn’t outrun, even if you pushed’er Hell-bent ‘til dawn. So it is with a hard-won honorary degree from my own school of barroom philosophy that I decree: It is Ron Wallace’s gift of the music of language that gets me through those nights that are so black I start prayin’ for the blues.
Chris Wall
Poet & Singer/Songwriter
Wallace's poetry is vernacular for sure, but it keeps company with Dickey, Fairchild and Jeffers whose influence inflect the poet's voice with a gruff yet lyrical honesty, seldom seen in contemporary poetry.
Jeanetta Calhoun Mish
2017-2020 Poet Laureate
of Oklahoma
An icon of Oklahoma poetry, Ron Wallace's work asks its readers to ponder the shadow outlines others leave behind, how they will fill them in, and ponder what we will leave behind in turn. His poems are often autumnal and haunting, but there is also the warmth of spring lurking in them for those who look.
Paul Juhasz ~ Poet
2021-2024 Director of the
Woody Guthrie Poets
BIO
Ron Wallace is an Oklahoma native and currently an adjunct instructor of English at Southeastern Oklahoma State University, in Durant, Oklahoma, where he was born and raised. His father served as a police officer there, rising to the rank of captain. He is the author of eleven books of poetry, six of which have been finalists in the Oklahoma Book Awards with Renegade and Other Poems winning the 2017 Oklahoma Book Award.
Wallace's poetry has been influenced by Howard Starks, James Dickey, Robinson Jeffers, B.H. Fairchild and Yusef Komunyakaa.
His fiction reflects the styles of Robert B. Parker, Peter Bowen, John MacDonald, and James Lee Burke, his novel, A Secret Lies in New Orleans, marks the prize-winning poet's first venture into prose, although a second book is nearing completion. Updates will be available here.
CONTACT
For any media inquiries, please contact Ron Wallace:
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