Doug Anderson’s first book of poems, The Moon Reflected Fire, from Alice James Books, won the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, and his second, Blues for Unemployed Secret Police, a grant from the Academy of American Poets. His memoir, Keep Your Head Down, was published by W.W. Norton in 2009. His most recent book of poems is Horse Medicine, from Barrow Street Books. He has also written plays, film scripts, journalism and fiction. His play, Short Timers, was produced at Theater for the New City in New York. His work has appeared in Ploughshares, the Southern Review, Poetry, Field, the Massachusetts Review, the Virginia Quarterly Review and many other journals and magazines. His grants and awards include a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Massachusetts Cultural Council, Poets & Writers, the Virginia Quarterly Review, and other funding organizations. He teaches in the MFA Program at Western New England University.

“Richard Burton said his father was famous as a miner because he could see the character of the coal. He would look at the face a bit, then hit it hard in the right spot, and tons of coal would fall down. I don’t know if the story is true, but I know it’s true of these poems about that war.”
—Jack Gilbert

“Doug Anderson is one of the bravest poets I know, utterly uncompromising. His language brims with compassion, rage, tenderness and pain. The Vietnam war is his primary subject, rendered here with a startling clarity of image and understanding, a wrenching intimacy born of experience. Anderson is cursed and blessed with memory, and his considerable poetic gift assures that we will not forget, either.”
—Martín Espada

“What is perhaps most striking about Doug Anderson’s The Moon Reflected Fire is the poet’s ability to have found forms to contain experiences most of us would not be able to acknowledge let alone embrace. He has constructed these forms with what might be called a lyrical narration wherein the poems are driven not simply by a linear telling of events, but by a careful layering of consciousness as well.”
—Bruce Weigl