A fourth generation native of Northern California, Tim Hunt was born in Calistoga and raised primarily in Sebastopol, two small towns north of San Francisco. At that time, Sebastopol was still primarily apple orchards, and the wine industry had not yet made Calistoga chic. As a boy he also identified strongly with the Lake County region of his father's family, an area where quicksilver mining had once been profitable.
Educated at Cornell University, he has taught American literature at several schools, including Washington State University and Deep Springs College. He is currently Professor of English at Illinois State University, in Normal, Illinois. He and his wife Susan, a respiratory therapist, have two children: John, a visual artist, and Jessica, a musician and composer.
Hunt's publications include the collection Fault Lines (The Backwaters Press), the chapbooks Lake County Diamond (Intertext) and White Levis (Pudding House Press), and numerous poems in magazines. He has also been awarded the Chester H. Jones National Poetry Prize for the poem "Lake County Elegy." His scholarly publications include Kerouac's Crooked Road: Development of a Fiction and the five-volume edition The Collected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers.
"How can something be so genuine and at the same time smack you upside the head with its sarcasm? If you mean what you say, can it still be facetious and sardonic? Tim Hunt's collection of poems tells it like it is with a pure American tongue. He balances the elegance of a true poet's pen with a sometimes playful, sometimes barbed commentary on our way of life. Poetry is alive and well in the U.S. thanks to Tim Hunt's imagery, Americana, and his acerbic wit."
Larry Joe Campbell
"Tim Hunt's Redneck Yoga is a breath of fresh air and a joy to read. He tells his OWN story in his own special way, and you can't do better than that.His affection and understanding of the hidden beauty of the American underground vernacular of the 1950s honors the voices of those long-gone denizens of the night whose scatting stretched the language and whose special energy changed America. Just like Dante in his Terza Rima and Kerouac in his flights of fancy, Tim Hunt paints us a portrait of our surroundings and makes you want to celebrate life and write a poem yourself."
David Amram
