About Henry Hughes
Henry Hughes grew up on Long Island, New York. After completing an MA in Creative Writing at Purdue University in 1990, he spent five years working in Japan and China. He returned to the U.S., completed a Ph.D. in American Literature at Purdue in 2002, and began teaching at Western Oregon University.
Hughes is the author of five collections of poetry, including Men Holding Eggs (2004 Oregon Book Award), Moist Meridian (2011 Finalist for the Oregon Book Award), Shutter Lines (2012, with photos by Paul Gentry), Bunch of Animals (2016) and Sergeant Dark (Lost Horse Press, 2025).
A recipient of a Mellon Foundation Grant in Literature, the Oberon Poetry Prize, the Oscar Wilde Award, and the Sherwin Howard Award, his poems, stories, and essays have appeared in Antioch Review, Carolina Quarterly, Painted Bride Quarterly, Queen’s Quarterly, North American Review, Sewanee Review, Shenandoah, Seattle Review, and Harvard Review where his book reviews regularly run. His fishing memoir, Back Seat with Fish: A Man’s Adventures in Angling and Romance, was published in 2016 by Skyhorse and selected as “Best of the Year” in The Guide to Outdoor Literature. He is the editor of the Everyman’s Library anthologies, The Art of Angling: Poems about Fishing, Fishing Stories, River Poems, and River Stories, and his poems and essays related to fishing appear in Gray’s Sporting Journal, Anglers Journal, The Flyfish Journal and The American Fly Fisher. He received the 2022 Austin Hogan Award for “Images Run Through It: Illustrating Maclean’s Masterpiece” appearing in The American Fly Fisher, as well as the Boating Writers International Prize for “Against the Grain” published in Anglers Journal.
Henry Hughes is the director of Write Place: Literature, Arts & the Environment, and a professor of literature and writing at Western Oregon University.