George Looney has published eleven books of poetry (three of which won national awards, and four others which were finalists for national awards) and two poetry chapbooks, as well as three award-winning collections of fiction—a novel, a novella, and a collection of stories. A fourth collection of fiction—The Visibility of Things Long Submerged—won the BOA Editions Short Fiction Award and will be published in the spring of 2023.

Looney’s collection The Acrobatic Company of the Invisible won The Cider Press Review Editors’ Prize, and a chapbook, written with Douglas Smith, Birds of Sympathy: Correspondences, won The Apogee Poetry Chapbook Prize from April Gloaming Press.

His books have won the BOA Editions Short Fiction Award, The Elixir Press Fiction Award (and the Elixir Press Fiction Chapbook Award), the Leapfrog Press Fiction Award, the Red Mountain Press Poetry Award, the White Pine Press Poetry Award, and the Bluestem Award for Poetry, and his poetry has also won a number of other awards, including the Larry Levis Editors’ Award in Poetry from The Missouri Review as well as prizes from Zone 3, New Letters, The Literary Review, and Flyway: A Literary Review.

He has received a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship and two grants from the Ohio Arts Council, as well as a $10,000 fellowship from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts.

His work has been published in such journals as AGNI, Alaska Quarterly Review, The American Journal of Poetry, Ascent, Chicago Quarterly Review, Connecticut Review, The Denver Quarterly, The Florida Review, The Georgia Review, The Gettysburg Review, Indiana Review, The Kenyon Review, The Laurel Review, New England Review, Nimrod International Journal, The Ohio Review, Prairie Schooner, Quarterly West, Raritan, The Southern Review, Verse Daily, Western Humanities Review, and many others.

For eight years he served as editor-in-chief of Mid-American Review, for which he is now translation editor. His M.F.A. is from Bowling Green State University. He is editor of Lake Effect and founder of the BFA creative writing program at Penn State Behrend, and he was co-founder of the original Chautauqua Writers’ Festival.

He has received Penn State University’s Undergraduate Program Leadership Award, and Penn State Behrend’s Council of Fellows Faculty Research Award.