Jonathan Fink
- Position: Professor and Coordinator of Creative Writing
- Department: English
- Office Location: Remote
- jfink@uwf.edu
- Campus: 850.474.2923
Biography
Jonathan Fink is the author of three poetry collections: Don’t Do It – We Love You, My Heart (Dzanc, 2025), Barbarossa: The German Invasion of the Soviet Union and the Siege of Leningrad (Dzanc, 2016), and The Crossing (Dzanc, 2015). The Crossing received the Bronze Medal in Poetry in the 2015 Florida Book Awards and was a finalist for the Bob Bush Memorial Award for First Book of Poetry from the Texas Institute of Letters and Foreword Reviews‘ INDIEFAB Book of the Year Award in Poetry. Following the book’s publication, Jonathan was named by Poets&Writers as one of ten “2015 Debut Poets.” Barbarossa: The German Invasion of the Soviet Union and the Siege of Leningrad received the Philosophical Society of Texas 2017 Award of Merit in Poetry and was a finalist for the Helen C. Smith Award for Best Book of Poetry from the Texas Institute of Letters.
In 2023, Jonathan was an Artist-in-Residence Fellow at Joshua Tree National Park, working on a narrative poem (“In My Hour of Darkness, In My Time of Need”) about the life and death of Gram Parsons and Gram Parsons’s connection to Joshua Tree. A limited-edition print/art-chapbook version of the poem illustrated by Jonathan’s wife, artist Julie Fink, is available for free digitally on his website, and a print copy is available for purchase.
His poems have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Poetry, New England Review, TriQuarterly, Slate, The Southern Review, World Literature Today, and Virginia Quarterly Review, among other publications. He has also received the Editors’ Prize in Poetry from The Missouri Review, the Porter Fleming Award in Poetry, and fellowships or scholarships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Florida Division of Cultural Affairs, the St. Botolph Club Foundation, Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. From 2003-2006 he was the Creative Writing Fellow in Poetry at Emory University.
In addition to writing poetry, Jonathan also writes immersive, place-based, and personal essays that have appeared in Witness, Narrative, The Missouri Review, and Southwest Review, among other publications. He received the McGinnis-Ritchie Award for Nonfiction/Essay from Southwest Review, and he has had an essay named as one of 100 notable essays of the year in multiple editions of the Best American Essays series.
He currently lives in Pensacola with his wife and kids and is Professor and Coordinator of Creative Writing at the University of West Florida, where he also edits Panhandler Magazine and Panhandler Books.
Degrees & Institutions
Fink received his bachelor’s degree in English from Trinity University and his master of fine arts degree in poetry from Syracuse University, where he received awards from The Atlantic Monthly and Associated Writing Programs.
Keywords: poetry, creative writing, Panhandler Magazine, UWF Visiting Writers Series, The Crossing, Barbarossa
