David Swerdlow teaches English and creative writing at Westminster College. The recipient of several awards for his writing, including the Rose Lefcowitz award for poetry from Poet Lore and two fellowships from the Pennsylvania Council for the Arts, he has been a Fulbright professor of literature in Perú and a National Endowment on the Humanities fellow. His chapbook of poems, The Last Hill and the Wild Trees, was featured in The Ohio Review, and his poems and essays have appeared in many other distinguished journals, including West Branch, The Journal, The Beloit Poetry Journal and Luna. He holds a B.A. in English from the University of Maryland, and an M.A. and Ph.D. in English from Ohio University.

About Small Holes in the Universe:

"We think of the meditative as grounded in the large-minded moment—in sweeping thought or stillness. David Swerdlow’s Small Holes in the Universe is a sustained meditation that neither spins nor toils in ideas or projects, but instead celebrates the specific gravities of daily life and its losses and gains and its place in the scheme of things. What is large here is the capacity of the heart and the music that contains it."
—Stanley Plumly

"David Swerdlow's poems are never dull or expected—in sense, prosody, or word music. His images and ideas 'leap' so imaginatively that it is a delight following his twists and turns until they end in what, in hindsight, seems so natural, so appropriate. So, it's no coincidence that he refers to Cesar Vallejo and James Wright here—masters of such leaping—and it's also no coincidence that he nods to Keats, for these poems rock and sway with such word music and musical prosody that they carry the reader along in their current, joyfully."
—Len Roberts

"What a great tenderness these poems have toward the richly-surfaced world we encounter here. From familiar scenes of America, to the internalized exoticism of Peru and Mexico, the sharp particularity of life is recalled, celebrated, wondered at. With these searching lyrics, David Swerdlow again and again investigates the metaphoric dimensions of life on earth."
—Wayne Dodd