John Morgan studied with Robert Lowell at Harvard and won the Hatch Prize for Lyric Poetry. He received his M.F.A. from the Iowa Writers' Workshop where he was awarded the Academy of American Poets Prize. In 1976, he moved with his family to Fairbanks, Alaska to direct the creative writing program at the University of Alaska. Each of Morgan's first three books was chosen for publication in national competitions. He has published three books with Salmon Poetry. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, The American Poetry Review, The Paris Review, The Kenyon Review, Prairie Schooner, The New Republic, and more. He has won the Discovery Award of the New York Poetry Center, first prize in the Carolina Quarterly Poetry Contest, and has received writing grants from the Alaska State Council on the Arts and the Rasmuson Foundation. He was awarded a scholarship to the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, and a writing fellowship at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. In 2009, he served as the first writer-in-residence at Denali National Park.