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Check out the online feature on “Poems of the Spirit” that I edited for Poetry International here!
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Luke Hankins was born in Mississippi in 1984 and grew up in Louisiana before moving to his current home in Asheville, North Carolina. He is a graduate of the Indiana University MFA Program in Creative Writing, where he held the Yusef Komunyakaa Fellowship in Poetry. The author of two full-length poetry collections, Radiant Obstacles and Weak Devotions, as well as a poetry chapbook, Testament (Texas Review Press, 2023), Hankins has edited or co-edited a number of anthologies, including Between Paradise & Earth: Eve Poems (with Nomi Stone) and Poems of Devotion: An Anthology of Recent Poets. He is also the author of a book of essays, The Work of Creation, and a volume of translations from the French of Stella Vinitchi Radulescu, A Cry in the Snow & Other Poems—which was noted in the The New York Times Book Review.

Hankins is the founder and Editor of Orison Books, a non-profit literary press focused on the life of the spirit from a broad and inclusive range of perspectives. He also serves as an Associate Editor at Asheville Poetry Review and teaches poetry at Warren Wilson College and in UNC Asheville’s Great Smokies Writing Program.

Awarded the 2016 Dash Literary Journal poetry prize and twice shortlisted for The Montreal International Poetry Prize, Hankins’ poems, essays, and translations have appeared or are forthcoming in numerous periodicals, including 32 Poems, American Literary Review, The Collagist, EcoTheo Review, EuropeNow, Image, Linebreak, New England Review, New Poetry in Translation, Pleiades, Poetry International, storySouth, Verse, Waxwing, West Branch, World Literature Today, and The Writer’s Chronicle, as well as on the American Public Media radio program “On Being.” His poems have been anthologized in Without a Doubt: Poems Illuminating Faith (NYQ Books, 2021), Misrepresented People: Poetic Responses to Trump’s America (NYQ Books, 2018), The Poet’s Quest for God (Eyewear Publishing, UK, 2016), The World is Charged: Poetic Engagements with Gerard Manley Hopkins (Clemson University Press, 2016), The Southern Poetry Anthology, Vol. VII: North Carolina (Texas Review Press, 2015), The Global Poetry Anthology (Signal Editions, Canada, 2015), and Becoming Fire: Spiritual Writing from Rising Generations (Cascade Books, 2009). Some of his poems have been translated into Albanian, French, and Serbian.