David Starkey is Professor Emeritus of English, Founding Director of the Creative Writing Program and former Director of the Composition Program at Santa Barbara City College. For many years, he was a book reviewer for the Santa Barbara Independent.
Starkey served as Santa Barbara’s 2009-2011 Poet Laureate and is the Publisher and Co-editor, with Chryss Yost, of Gunpowder Press. Over the past thirty years, he has published seven full-length collections of poetry with small presses and more than 500 poems in literary journals such as American Scholar, Georgia Review, Prairie Schooner and Southern Review. His textbook, Creative Writing: Four Genres in Brief (Bedford/St. Martin’s) is in its fourth edition.
A frequent collaborator with the late Wendy Bishop, Starkey helped develop a pedagogy focused on the “cross-pollination” of composition and creative writing. In addition to his work with Bishop, which includes the co-authored Keywords in Creative Writing (2006), he is the editor of two collections of essays on pedagogy, Teaching Writing Creatively (1998) and Genre by Example: Writing What We Teach (2001), and a special issue of Teaching English in the Two-Year College (Dec. 2014).