poet & editor & professor


Amorak Huey is a poet and professor, a writer and sometime journalist, a decent dad and a mediocre slow-pitch softball player, an occasional essayist and co-founder of a small poetry press. He pronounces his first name uh-MOR-ack.

Amorak is author of four poetry collections: Dad Jokes from Late in the Patriarchy (Sundress Publications, 2021); Boom Box (Sundress Publications, 2019); Seducing the Asparagus Queen (Cloudbank Books, 2018), winner of the Vern Rutsala Poetry Prize; and Ha Ha Ha Thump (Sundress Publications, 2015), as well as as two poetry chapbooks: The Insomniac Circus (Hyacinth Girl Press, 2014) and A Map of the Farm Three Miles from the End of Happy Hollow Road (Porkbelly Press, 2016).

In addition, he is co-author, with W. Todd Kaneko, of the textbook Poetry: A Writer’s Guide and Anthology, published by Bloomsbury Academic in January 2018 (with a second edition freshly arrived in 2024), and the poetry chapbook Slash / Slash, published in 2021 and winner of the Diode Editions Chapbook Prize. 

Amorak holds a B.A. in English from Birmingham-Southern College and an M.F.A. in creative writing from Western Michigan University. 

Amorak + Eeyore

Amorak was born in Kalamazoo, Mich., and grew up in a small town outside Birmingham, Ala. After nearly 15 years as a reporter and editor, he left the newspaper business in 2008 to teach writing at Grand Valley State University in Michigan. He is now a professor of English at Bowling Green State University in Ohio, teaching in the creative writing BFA and MFA programs.

His poems appear in anthologies such as The Best American Poetry 2012; The Bedford AP Literature & Composition textbook; the Norton Critical Edition of Emily Wilson’s translation of The Odyssey; The Poetry of Sex edited by Sophie Hannah; Poetry in Michigan, Michigan in Poetry; and Poet’s Market 2014, as well as numerous print and online venues such as the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-A-Day series, Verse Daily, The Southern Review, The Cincinnati Review, Oxford AmericanPoet Lore, Ninth Letter, Crab Orchard Review, and others. He received a Fellowship in Creative Writing from the National Endowment for the Arts in 2017.

During his newspaper career, Amorak worked in a variety of editing and reporting roles for the Tallahassee (Fla.) Democrat; the Courier-Journal of Louisville, Ky.; The News-Enterprise of Hardin County, Ky.; the Lexington (Ky.) Herald-Leader; and The Grand Rapids (Mich.) Press, where he was assistant sports editor.

In March 2022, Amorak and Han VanderHart co-founded River River Books, which published its first poetry books in June 2023.