Tony Tost

Tony Tost (born 1975) is an American film director, poet, critic and screenwriter. His first poetry book Invisible Bride won the 2003 Walt Whitman Award judged by C.D. Wright. He is the creator, executive producer, and showrunner of Damnation, a neo-western period drama about the labor wars in America during the 1930s that aired on USA Network and on Netflix outside the US. He is the writer-director of Americana, a rural crime drama forthcoming from Bron Studios. Early life Tost was born in Springfield, Missouri and grew up in a series of single and double-wide trailers in and around Enumclaw, Washington. His parents were the day and night custodians at his elementary school and were the president and secretary of their labor union. Before becoming a writer, Tost began working full-time at the age of fifteen, working fast food and retail jobs, in a pickle factory, cleaning hotels and condos, washing dishes, and janitorial work. He is a graduate of both Green River Community College in Auburn, Washington and College of the Ozarks in Point Lookout, Missouri. After his undergraduate education, Tost graduated with a Master of Fine Arts degree in Creative Writing from the University of Arkansas. He then completed a Ph.D. in English from Duke University, writing his dissertation on the poetics of innovative modernists such as Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein. Career Tost is the founding editor of the online poetry magazine Fascicle and previously a co-editor and co-founder, with Zachary Schomburg, of Octopus Magazine. His poems and essays have appeared in the literary journals Fence, Hambone, Talisman, Mandorla, No: a journal of the arts, Denver Quarterly, Typo, American Literature, Jacket, Verse, Open Letter and elsewhere.