College of Humanities and Sciences

Devon Walker-Figueroa is the author of “Lazarus Species” (Milkweed Editions, 2025) and “Philomath” (Milkweed Editions, 2021), which won the National Poetry Series, the Levis Reading Prize, and was the first poetry collection to be named a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Prize. A former Amy Lowell Travel Scholar and Jill Davis Fellow at NYU, her poetry and short stories have appeared in such publications as The New York Review of Books, The Nation, The Harvard Advocate, Poetry and New England Review.

Q&A with Devon Walker-Figueroa

Where did you grow up? Can you tell us a little about your educational journey?

I grew up in Kings Valley, a ghost town in the Oregon coast range. Most people in Oregon don’t even know where it is because it’s so small, so I usually just say that I’m from Philomath, which is both the nearest town and the mailing address for people in the valley. My family raised wine grapes — pinot noir and riesling — and my sister and I, being homeschooled, spent a good deal of our time helping out with the farming chores. Though there were farms all around us — other vineyards, a few Christmas tree farms, some sheep and cattle ranches, etc., the landscape we were immersed in was not dominated by the human presence, such that you could, with a bit of imagination, assemble a good idea what it would have been like before people had settled there. I think this aspect of my childhood setting continues to influence my poetics, which never take for granted the human presence. Every car and road and house and fence, every bit of cast metal or fleck of paint — any fabricated thing, in essence, registers as out of place to me, even as an adult. Our species’ imposition on the environment, the exaggerated way in which our presence inscribes the land, leaps out at me by default. 

In terms of educational journey, to answer the question, beyond being homeschooled and having a hands-on agricultural education, my sister and I were also trained in the arts, specifically classical ballet and classical and folk music. We both learned to read music before we learned to read words. I think we were two, maybe three, when we began playing violin. By the time I was eight, I was transitioning into harp from violin. I had heard a harpist, Gary Garitan, playing electric harp and selling cassette tapes at the Polk County Fair when I was four, and after a year of watching me fall asleep pressed to the floor speaker out of which that music emerged (played constantly by yours truly), my mother decided to seek out lessons for me. Mercifully, one of the only seven professional harpists in the state of Oregon at that time, lived within a forty-minute drive from us and, after meeting with me, decided to lower her age limit for students and take me on. We didn’t have much money, so I was very fortunate that she had several harps and was willing to rent us a full-sized one at the ridiculously low rate of $20 a month. That teacher, Laura Zaerr, has definitely been one of the most influential educators in my life, not only because she taught me performance and technique and artistry, but because she immediately had me start composing and arranging music, got me involved in symphonies, and provided incredible rigor without ever spurring me on with harshness or undue judgement. 

The ballet education was a different story. And I don’t have time to get into it too deeply here, but suffice it to say that after training with the Kirov Ballet School, the Pacific Northwest Ballet School and American Ballet Theater’s Summer school, I moved out at age fifteen to pursue the professional track through the Houston Ballet Academy, through which I got to perform with the Houston Ballet. I did this until I was nineteen, at which point I burned out from injuries and the standard eating disorders, though this ended up being a blessing, because I was, after trial courses with sculpture and microbiology and some other pursuits, able to translate all that artistic energy into writing and literature. This led me to transfer from my local community college to Cornell University, and from there to Bennington College, where I studied poetry and neuroscience. I later received MFA’s in creative writing from Iowa and NYU respectively, the former for poetry, the latter for fiction. Iowa was very hands-off and gave me much needed space to complete a book. NYU was very mentorship-forward, and Jeffrey Eugenides and Joyce Carol Oates became important mentors and friends to me while there. All to say, both programs were essential and provided complimentary educational opportunities.

When did you first fall in love with your field of study? What made you decide to work in academia?

I fell in love with music and with the music of human speech when I was a child. My devotion to poetry really intensified when I was about nineteen years old though. It was around this time that my capacity to perform in ballet was leaving my body, because I’d sustained some pretty serious hip injuries, and it felt as though I was losing my first and truest language. Poetry was there as a form into which I could translate that language. I don’t know what I would have done without it. There was an essential aspect of my life that would have been cut off from me, shut away, if I’d not found poetry in that moment. Poetry rescued me from a terrible silence that was closing in — not the silence of reverence or surprise, not the silence that throws each note or word into wonderful relief, but the silence of some voided astonishment, some essential pleasure being deleted from your senses. 

Can you explain the focus of your research?

My research entails everything I read and everything I experience. Poetry and prosody, short fiction, philosophy, neuroscience and languages (Kiswahili, Spanish, Old English and some coding languages) are areas of sustained interest and focus.

Can you talk a little about your teaching philosophy? What do you most like about teaching?

My teaching philosophy is pretty practical and adaptive. Coming out of a rigorous performing arts background defined by ballet and classical harp and music theory, I recognize the value of a strong technical foundation. All to say, I find that supplying my students with a broad range of readings (reading is a creative act in itself) then offers them a likewise broad range of techniques, approaches, and perspectives. Typically, I give them exemplars of various forms. Then I invite them to immediately apply these lessons from other writers to their own work, such that they don’t have time for hesitation to set in and, also, so that they can have a sense of ongoing conversation with other writers (across space and time and culture and language and philosophy, etc.). 

Reading variety is absolutely crucial, so they can exercise their will to the greatest extent possible in their own practice. For example, if we study together the composition of a quasīdah, a sonnet, a canzone, a pantoum, etc. and we cover great variety of image systems and rhythms and ways to place silences, if we then look at the historical frameworks surrounding a given poem and notice how events and environments intermingle with subjectivity, the students can then be free to create their own forms and perspectives, their own methods of image-making and sonic-contouring of emotion in the reader. In essence, once they have a certain number of these forms and methods mastered, they are free to invent and combine which elements or approaches-to-line as best suit their work and most accurately reify into poetry what they have not yet been able to express. 

To answer your second question, there is no single thing that I prefer about teaching. I do particularly love that teaching is an exchange, though — that we, as educators, are always learning, and that teaching becomes a way for the artist to continue growing along with their students. My pedagogy is very rooted in history in the sense that I want to give my students access to every moment of poetry that has come before this one (impossible, but worth it to try), and yet it is equally rooted in the present, in the methods of attention to the world-as-it-is-happening that are necessary to the creation of any poem that will enjoy, in its future, the privilege of being remembered.

What attracted you to VCU? What are you most excited about in regards to VCU and Richmond?

I have adored VCU from the first time I visited its campus, met its students and connected with its faculty. I had the great good fortune of being awarded VCU’s Levis Reading Prize for my first book “Philomath,” and that gave me the opportunity to come visit in October of 2022. During my stay, I had conversations with some of the closest readers of poetry that I have ever met. The VCU students’ depth of attention and rigor of reading practice was moving. We would be talking about a poem, and someone would begin reciting the referenced poem, for example. These are skills that take time and devotion, and in a moment such as our own, which is so rife with distractions tailor made to become addictive, it is a huge testament to the literature students at VCU that they have kept their deep attentiveness in tact, and that their devotion to the page is so obviously unshakeable. I also really appreciate how the students were obviously practicing, in the tradition of Larry Levis and Claudia Emerson, a poetics of inclusivity — on the level of ethos but also aesthetics. 

Can you tell us either a quirky fact about yourself or some of your hobbies?

Oh gosh, I suppose it is maybe a bit odd that I am trying to teach myself to read Sumerian and Python coding at the same time. None of my “recipes” in the latter category run too well. And my practices in the former resemble those of the children from Sumer — the paper equivalent of those little terracotta tablets with, oh maybe five logograms or phonemes written over and over. The poet Jack Gilbert once wrote, in regards to aging, that he had “moved beyond the beginning.” I admire his work and his thinking, and I believe what he said. But I think I will never move beyond the beginning, in that I savor the humility that taking up new pursuits requires. Maybe I’ll live to be old, and, in that sense, I will understand the ending of life as more gradual than I understand it to be right now, when all I have experienced of death is suddenness, the suddenness of not having someone here any longer. But even then, I like to believe that I will retain the will to be a perpetual beginner in some way — to reach into some area that reminds me of how fragile my own knowledge in any other area truly is.