George Looney has published sixteen books of poetry (five of which won national awards, and four others which were finalists for national awards) as well as four award-winning collections of fiction—a novel, a novella, and two collections of stories. And he edited a collection of poetry and prose by Douglas Smith, who tragically died in 2018, The Ceremony of Opening the Mouth: The Poetry and Prose of Douglas Smith.

His collection Conversations with the Visible: The Caravaggio Poems, has just won the May Sarton New Hampshire Poetry Prize, and is scheduled to be published in April of 2027.

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 Cider Press Review Editors’ Prize, the Apogee Poetry Chapbook 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 MFA. 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.