Joe Wilkins is the author of a memoir, The Mountain and the Fathers (Counterpoint 2012), and a previous collection of poems, Killing the Murnion Dogs (Black Lawrence Press 2011). His poems, essays, and stories have appeared in the Georgia Review, the Southern Review, Harvard Review, Ecotone, the Sun, Orion, and Slate, among other magazines and literary journals. He lives with his wife, son, and daughter in north Iowa, where he teaches writing at Waldorf College.

Books by Joe Wilkins:

Other poems on the web by Joe Wilkins:
Two poems
"Absence"
"The Names"
"Leviathan"
"The Fixt and Random Universe Is Seen to Move"
"Anniversary"
"Somewhere South of Miles City"
"Daybreak, Spokane, September 2001"

Joe Wilkins's Website.

About Notes from the Journey Westward:

"Moving through this book is, truly, a wondrous journey: across rugged landscapes and the vast unsettled past that WAS the west. 'A hard world away.' With a ferociously steely eye and equally ferociously tender heart, Wilkins surprises us at every juncture. Echoes of ancestral voices crisscross. Quiet intimate moments intersect with large socio-political issues. Spare poems, long poems, prose poems—I so admire the depth and breadth of work here, in how much Wilkins manages to pack in and carry along in our ever-onwarding little wagon."
—Nance Van Winckel

"Joe Wilkins’ poems are savage and beautiful, full of hard-won lives and a godawful tenderness. In one poem the speaker says they need a myth to tell them 'Be alive', but Wilkins has written that myth, and it is called Notes from the Journey Westward. In this book Manifest Destiny is more than political rhetoric—it’s a call to find the limits of survival. The edge of America has more than an ocean. It has dust-stunned men, hardscrabble women, and a patient devil, sharpening his teeth. We’re in this world whether it belongs to God or not—alive and bearing it."
—Traci Brimhall

"For Joe Wilkins, the American West is no theme park or romantic diorama. Notes from the Journey Westward offers an earnest glimpse into past and present landscapes that are real and imagined, mourned and celebrated and witnessed—for these, to borrow the words of Nazim Hikmet, are human landscapes. Wilkins isn’t the kind of poet to offer answers or satisfy himself with quaint definitions of self or place. He’s the kind of poet whose writing is as ambitious as it is beautiful, as honest as it is lyrical. The unflinching poems in this collection are a delight."
—Michael McGriff