Will Walker was born and raised in Boston, Massachusetts, and spent his summers on Cape Cod, in Provincetown. He moved to San Francisco in 1973 after exhausting all other options and has lived there since. He lives in the Haight with his wife, Valerie, and their spirited Chihuahua.
His poetry has appeared in Across Borders, Alabama Literary Review, Alimentum, Bark, Burningwood, Chagrin River Review, The Chiron Review, Conch.es, Crack the Spine, Diverse Arts Project, Forge, The Haight Ashbury Literary Journal, Hartskill Review, Lame Duck, Passager, Pennsylvania English, Spillway Review, Street Sheet, Red Hills Review, Rougarou, Schuylkill Valley Journal of the Arts, Slow Trains, Spillway Review, Street Sheet, Street Spirit, Studio One, and WriterAdvice.
As a general summary of his life, he currently embraces these words from Berndt Oksendal's Stochastic Differential Equations: An Introduction with Applications: We have not succeeded in answering all our problems. The answers we have found only serve to raise a whole set of new questions. In some ways we feel we are as confused as ever, but we believe we are confused on a higher level, and about more important things.
These inviting, conversational poems are up to something audacious. Giving voice to the arthritic Olympian amidst our familiar streets and houses, Will Walker alerts readers to the gods that live among-and in-us. Whether bitching at time, ambition, and other people, or reaching near-transcendental joy in praise of a baby, a leaf, or a functioning household appliance, Walker restores a little divine mojo to our mortal step.
-Julie Bruck, author of How to Avoid Huge Ships
Praise for Will Walker's first book, Wednesday after Lunch
Will Walker has written a collection of poems so intelligent and clear that reading them I wake up-and find myself alive in the world. This is what art can do-and every time it happens it's a miracle. Here is a miraculous book-awake to what the Buddhists call the "full catastrophe" of living right now. If you want to feel yourself alive and in great company, buy this book and read it, and then pass it on.
-Marie Howe, author of New and Selected Poems
There is a calm meditative grace to the poems in Will Walker's Wednesday after Lunch. His is a narrative "in the American grain," to use William Carlos Williams' phrase. While some are quiet lyric poems of love of landscape and streetscape and quite human dogs, and some of a sweet domestic love, even asleep, a man and his wife "on your own side/ of the bed/ split neatly into neighboring countries," Walker's work has that very American room for Khrushchev at the UN pounding his shoe, and rhinestones, and Monopoly, and Jack Ruby, and Marilyn Monroe. In a tour de force of a poem, he writes of a dream of a bonfire, a barbecue on the flats in Provincetown, everyone from his Edenic past reunited, and "even the ocean loves to gather by fire." These are poems to warm yourself by.
-Gail Mazur, author of Land's End: New and Selected Poems
