In July of 2005 Copper Canyon Press published his latest book of poems: While We've Still Got Feet. It went into its second printing in February 2006.

In September of 1999 Copper Canyon Press published his latest book of poems: Moment to Moment: Poems of a Mountain Recluse, which is now in its fourth printing.

Garrison Keillor reads frequently from David's poems on his National Public Radio program The Writer's Almanac.

David tours occasionally with avant-garde bassist and composer, William Parker and drummer Hamid Drake. In 2003 the three released, Songs for a Suffering World: A Prayer for Peace, a Protest Against War. William Parker and David also released in 1999, Zen Mountains-Zen Streets: A Duet for Poet and Improvised Bass, a two-CD set of a live performance which is available on the Boxholder Records label.

In 1999 also, Chelsea Green Publishing Company published a revised, expanded and updated version of Judevine: The Complete Poems, first published in 1991.

The play Judevine, which is based on the book, has now been produced 51 times in 24 states. The 1990 American Conservatory Theatre Production in San Francisco won the Bay Area Critics Circle Award for Best Ensemble Performance for that year.

David is also the creator and editor of The Judevine Mountain Emailite: a Cyberzine: an On-Line and On-Going Journal of Politics and Opinion, which is available on this website.

In 2000 David wrote the libretto for an opera, with music by composer Erik Nielsen, called A Fleeting Animal: An Opera from Judevine, which is based on two characters from the Judevine poems. A Fleeting Animal premiered in Vermont in October of 2000 to rave reviews and packed houses.

Among David Budbill's prizes and honors are: a National Endowment for the Arts Play Writing Fellowship in 1991, a Guggenheim Fellowship in Poetry in 1981 and The Dorothy Canfield Fisher Award for Fiction in 1978. In 2002 the Vermont Arts Council gave David the Walter Cerf Award for Lifetime Achievement in the Arts.

In New York City David has performed at John Zorn's The Stone, The China Institute, Merkin Hall at Lincoln Center, The Nuyorican Poets' Cafe, The Knitting Factory, The Great Hall at Cooper Union C.U.A.N.D.O., The Carpathian Orthodox Church, The Orenzantz Center, and All Souls Unitarian Church among numerous other venues.

The Los Angeles Daily News says that David Budbill writes "with rare honesty, affection and grace--and with language so precise and descriptive you will know immediately you're soul-deep in something extraordinary."

The Chicago Sun Times has described Budbill's writing as "Wrenchingly real, fiercely emotional and unexpectedly funny."

David Budbill was born in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1940 to a street car driver and a minister's daughter. In high school he spent his time playing jazz trumpet, running track, hunting and fishing. He studied philosophy and art history at Muskingum College in New Concord, Ohio, and got a graduate degree in theology at Union Theological Seminary in New York City.

At various times in his life he as worked as a carpenter's apprentice, short order cook, manager of a coffee house, day laborer on a Christmas tree farm, street gang worker, attendant in a mental hospital, forester, gardener, pastor of a church, high school and college teacher. In recent years he has earned a living, if you want to call it that, as a free lance writer, lecturer, children's book author, poet and playwright.

He has lived for the past thirty-five years on a remote hillside in the mountains of northern Vermont with his wife, Lois Eby, the painter, in a house he and his wife built themselves. They have two children.

Budbill's first book of poems, Barking Dog, was privately printed in 1968 and is out of print. His second book of poems, The Chain Saw Dance, was published by Countryman Press, with an introduction by Hayden Carruth and drawings by Lois Eby, and is now out of print after selling over 10,000 copies. His third book of poems, From Down to the Village, was published by the Ark, of Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1981 with an introduction by John Haines and drawings by Lois Eby and is also out of print. White Pine Press of Fredonia, NY, published Budbill's fourth book of poems, Why I Came to Judevine, in the spring of 1987, again with drawings by Lois Eby.

In 1991 Chelsea Green Publishing Company published Judevine: The Complete Poems, a 320-page epic poem/poetic novel and the culmination of twenty years work. Booklist chose Judevine: The Complete Poems as one of the three best books of poems published in 1991. Chelsea Green republished a revised and expanded edition of Judevine in the spring of 1999.

Budbill has also written a picture book for children, Christmas Tree Farm, with paintings by Donald Carrick, which was published by Macmillan in 1974 and was a Kirkus Choice Book for that year.

He has also written a collection of short stories, Snowshoe Trek to Otter River, published by Dial Press in 1976 in hardback and in paperback by Bantam Books, Skylark editions, in 1984. Snowshoe Trek to Otter River was a Kirkus Choice Book and was nominated for the Dorothy Canfield Fisher Award.

In 1978 Dial Press published, Budbill's novel, Bones on Black Spruce Mountain, which is a sequel to the short story collection. It also was nominated for and won the Dorothy Canfield Fisher Award. Bones on Black Spruce Mountain was published as a Puffin paperback and sold more than 120,000 copies.

Both Snowshoe Trek to Otter River and The Bones on Black Spruce Mountain were republished in 2004 and 2005 by Onion River Press, a publishing house that is now out of business. Orders for Snowshoe Trek to Otter River and The Bones on Black Spruce Mountain should be directed to David Budbill personally at: budbill@sover.net

David's first play, Mannequins' Demise, was published by Baker's Plays of Boston in 1966 and has been produced in more than 250 locations throughout the United States, Canada and Europe. It is now available only directly from David Budbill.

His second play, Knucklehead Rides Again, was produced a couple of times in New York and New Jersey and was published by Religious Theatre Magazine in 1967. It too is available only from the author.

His third poem/play, A Pulp Cutters' Nativity, in which characters from The Chain Saw Dance reappear and play out a modern adaptation of the English, medieval miracle play, "The Second Shepherds' Play," has been produced in numerous locations including McCarter Theatre in Princeton, New Jersey. A Pulp Cutters' Nativity was originally published by Countryman Press and is now included as part of Judevine.

In recent years David Budbill's poetry and prose have appeared in numerous periodicals some of which are: Inquiring Mind, The Sun, Saranac Review, Rivendell, Entelechy International, Heartstone, Hunger Mountain, Graffiti Rag, The Rutland Herald, Cedar Hill Review, Shambhala Sun, The Twelve Seasons of Vermont, The Maine Times, Harper's Magazine, Regional Review, The Henniker Review, New Virginia Review, Green Mountains Review, West Branch, Slow Dancer, The Seneca Review, Harvard Magazine, The San Francisco Chronicle, Not Man Apart, The Beloit Poetry Journal, Country Journal, Quest/79, Poetry Now, Vermont Life, The New Farm, Longhouse, The Hollins Critic, Organic Gardening, The Greensboro Review, Vermont Affairs, New Letters, The Greenfield Review, The Ohio Review, North by Northeast, Seeds of Change, The Great Circumpolar Bear Cult, and so forth.

Budbill's poems have been anthologized recently in Imagine a World: Poetry for Peacemakers (Pax Christi, 2005), America Zen: A Gathering of Poets (Bottom Dog Press, 2004), Cry Out: Poets Protest the War (George Braziller, 2003), This Art: Poems about Poetry (Copper Canyon Press, 2003) Good Poems, selected by Garrison Keillor (Viking Press, 2002), For a Living: The Poetry of Work, edited by Nicholas Coles and Peter Oresick (University of Illinois Press, 1995), The Rag and Bone Shop of the Heart, edited by Robert Bly, James Hillman, and Michael Meade (HarperCollins, 1992), Working Classics, edited by Peter Oresick and Nicholas Coles (University of Illinois Press, 1990), The Best American Poetry of 1989, edited by Donald Hall (Charles Scribner's and Sons, 1989), An Ear to the Ground: An Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry, edited by Marie Harris and Kathleen Aguero, (The University of Georgia Press, l989), and Wetting Our Lines Together, edited by Allen Hoey, (Tamarack Editions, 1982).

Programs and articles about his work have been featured on "Chronicle" a nightly news magazine on Boston's ABC affiliate, channel 5, on Vermont Educational Television, in The Boston Globe, The Oakland Tribune and in numerous other newspapers around the United States.

There is an extended interview with David by Diana Schmitt in the March 2004 issue of The Sun, Issue #339; also interviews in the Buddhist magazine Inquiring Mind, Fall 2004 and in The River Reporter's Literary Gazette, July 2005.

Budbill gives many readings from his work yearly in schools, colleges, natural food stores, restaurants, bars, art galleries and libraries. He has also written essays for and delivered speeches to an environmental studies class, a community college convocation, a state arts council, The Junior League, a law school, high school and college commencements, and an organic farmers convention among many other and diverse places. He has toured for various organizations in North Carolina, New York state, Vermont and Maine as well as given individual readings in New Hampshire, Ohio, Michigan, New Jersey, Florida, New York State, California, Texas, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania and Vermont.

He has been playwright-in-residence at Arena Stage in Washington, DC; Harvard University; Yale University; American Inside Theatre in Genesee Depot, Wisconsin; Texas Wesleyan University in Forth Worth, Texas; American Conservatory Theatre in San Francisco, California; Austin Peay State University in Clarksville, Tennessee and at McCarter Theatre in Princeton, New Jersey, and poet-in-residence at Haystack Mountain School of Crafts in Deer Isle, Maine; Jamestown Community College in Jamestown, New York and for Niagra-Erie Writers in Buffalo, New York.

During the 1995 Spring semester, Budbill was Guest Lecturer at The Buckham Seminar, Department of English, The University of Vermont, Burlington, VT.

David has an especial and lifelong interest in Black American Classical Music: Jazz, and this interest has led him to create a performance piece for the spoken human voice and various musical instruments made up of quotations from jazz musicians and woven into improvised music called A Love Supreme: A Found Poem for Black Music. He and various musicians have performed this piece both live and on public and commercial radio.

Each year since 1996, Budbill has been one of the featured poets at The Vision Festival, a week-long series of performances of avant garde jazz, dance and poetry on New York's Lower East Side.

Since its world premier at McCarter Theatre in 1984, Budbill's fourth play, Judevine, has gone on to tremendous popular and critical acclaim and has been produced by Vermont Repertory Theatre, in Burlington, Vermont, The Western Stage, in Salinas, California, Old Castle Theatre Company in Bennington, Vermont and has received staged readings at the Boston Athenaeum, in Boston, The Elizabeth Peabody House in Somerville, The Gloucester Stage in Gloucester, Massachusetts and Florida Studio Theatre in Sarasota, among many other places.

Judevine received its first Mainstage production at American Conservatory Theatre in San Francisco during January and February of 1990. The A.C.T. production won the Bay Area Critics Circle Award for Best Ensemble Performance for 1990.

Judevine has been produced 51 times in 24 states. For a complete listing of the places where Judevine has played go to: http://www.davidbudbill.com/play.html

Judevine: The Play in Two Acts was published by Heinemann in New American Plays: Vol. 2 in January of 1992.

Budbill's play, Thingy World!, a satire about American materialism and greed and its effect on the environment, received it's first fully mounted production at Austin Peay State University in Clarksville, Tennessee, in November of 1991.

Budbill's play, Little Acts of Kindness, is a series of encounters between the people who inhabit and pass through a city park; various musicians who play in the park make a wide variety of musical comments on the action of the play. The first production Little Acts of Kindness played to Standing Room Only audiences and rave reviews at Lost Nation Theatre in Montpelier, Vermont, in the summer of 1993. Center Stage Theatre Company produced a new version of Little Acts of Kindness, featuring the blues and gospel group The Disciples and toured Vermont playing in 13 different venues from the end of September to the beginning of November of 1995.

Little Acts will be produced in London by Westminster College, Paddington Green, in May of 2006.

Center Stage Theatre Company also staged his most recent play, Two For Christmas, in Montpelier, Burlington and White River Junction, Vermont, in December of 1996 where it sold out every night.

Budbill is also the editor of Danvis Tales, a collection of stories by Vermont's best-known 19th century writer, Rowland Robinson. Danvis Tales was published by The University Press of New England in the September 1995.

David has also written the Introductions for reprints of two of Mildred Walker's novels Dr. Norton's Wife (1938 ) and The Brewers' Big Horses (1940) both of which Bison Books published in 1996.

In the fall of 1998, David Budbill toured New England with avant garde bassist and composer William Parker performing Zen Mountains-Zen Streets: A Duet for Poet and Improvised Bass. Parker and Budbill have performed Zen Mountains-Zen Streets at many locations around the United States including New York's Nuyorican Poets' Cafe in October of 1999.
 
A live performance, double CD of Zen Mountains-Zen Streets was released in 1999 by Boxholder Records, P.O. Box 779, Woodstock, VT 05091.
 
In July of 2005 Copper Canyon Press published his latest book of poems: While We've Still Got Feet. It went into its second printing in February 2006.
 
In 1999 Copper Canyon Press also published Moment to Moment: Poems of a Mountain Recluse. It is now in its fourth printing.
 
Garrison Keillor reads frequently from David's poems on his daily NPR radio show, The Writers Almanac.
 
His essay "The Hermit and the Activist" which was originally published in the January 1999 issue of Shambhala Sun was excerpted and reprinted in the July/August issue of Utne Reader.
 
The Herald, a weekly newspaper in Randolph, Vermont, ran a poem a week from Moment to Moment on its Editorial Page for 52 weeks during the year 2000.
 
Budbill is also the Editor-in-Chief of The Judevine Mountain Emailite: A Cyberzine: An Online and Ongoing Journal of Politics and Opinion, available on this website.
 
David was an occasional commentator on National Public Radio's "All Things Considered" until he was fired for his left-wing political views.
 
In 2000 David wrote the libretto for an opera, with music by composer Erik Nielsen, called A Fleeting Animal: An Opera from Judevine, which is based on two characters from The Judevine poems called A Fleeting Animal premiered in Vermont in October of 2000 to full houses and rave reviews.
 
During 2000 David toured California promoting Moment to Moment, performed with William Parker and his Little Huey Creative Music Orchestra at Merkin Hall in New York City, performed Zen Mountains-Zen Streets with William Parker at The Rhode Island School of Design and at New England College and performed A Love Supreme: A Found Poem for Black Music. at the 5th Annual Vision Festival in New York City with Hamid Drake on drums, William Parker on bass, Roy Campbell on trumpet and Kidd Jordan on tenor saxophone.
 
In 2003 David, bassist William Parker and drummer Hamid Drake released the CD Songs for a Suffering World: A Prayer for Peace, a Protest Against War. It is available on the Boxholder Label.
 
In 2004 David was a participant in the Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival.
 
David continues to travel widely performing in many different venues. For his upcoming events and for past events go to: http://www.davidbudbill.com/calendar.html
 
Among David Budbill's prizes and honors are: a National Endowment for the Arts Play Writing Fellowship in 1991, a Guggenheim Fellowship in Poetry in 1981 and The Dorothy Canfield Fisher Award for Fiction in 1978. In 2002 the Vermont Arts Council gave David the Walter Cerf Award for Lifetime Achievement in the Arts.
 
In New York City David has performed at Merkin Hall at Lincoln Center, The Nuyorican Poets' Cafe, The Knitting Factory, The Great Hall at Cooper Union C.U.A.N.D.O., The Carpathian Orthodox Church, The Orenzantz Center, and All Souls Unitarian Church among numerous other venues.
 
The Los Angeles Daily News says that David Budbill writes "with rare honesty, affection and grace--and with language so precise and descriptive you will know immediately you're soul-deep in something extraordinary."
 
The Chicago Sun Times has described Budbill's writing as "Wrenchingly real, fiercely emotional and unexpectedly funny."
 
David is currently working on a play about family called "Papa."
 
For more information about specific books, performances, plays, essays, and so forth go to: http://www.davidbudbill.com/
 

as of 8 March 2006

Literary and Theatrical Agent: Susan Schulman: A Literary Agency, 454 West 44th Street New York, NY 10036 phone: (212) 713-1633 fax: (212) 581-8830 Schulman@aol.com

Updated: 10/14/2007

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