HWS News
10 March 2026 Schonning to Read from Debut Poetry Collection
Professor explores topics from suffering and loss of faith to everyday observations in As When Walking.
Professor of Practice and Director of HWS Debate Daniel Schonning ’16 will read from his debut poetry collection As When Walking on Thursday, March 12 at Writers & Books, 740 University Ave., Rochester, N.Y.
The event begins at 7 p.m. Schonning will be joined by Associate Professor of Writing and Rhetoric and English and Creative Writing Geoffrey Babbitt, author of A Grain of Sand in Lambeth. A livestream option is available and ticket prices range from free to $20. More details are available here.
"At this reading, Geoffrey Babbitt is serving as a host and happens to be the person to whom the book is dedicated, having been my Honors Thesis advisor while I was a student at HWS," says Schonning. "A full-circle moment like this is one of the loveliest parts of being back on campus as a staff member."
As When Walking explores themes of childhood suffering, loss of faith and the quiet significance of everyday images and objects. The collection moves between personal and observational moments, from the foreclosure of a family home and a father estranged by addiction to mallards on a frozen pond, flowering bindweed and a doorway to the underworld.
“In As When Walking, Schonning offers us language at its most incandescent,” says author Camille Dungy. “Sweet, sweet truths in poem after poem. Shimmering and satisfying, gentle and yet irrefutable.”
Schonning also employs formal structures to examine poetic lineage. Twenty-six poems in the collection are abecedarians, a form in which the opening letter of each line advances through the alphabet. The first poem progresses from A to Z, the second from B to A, the third from C to B and so on through the alphabet. The structure echoes Jewish mystical texts such as the Sefer Yetzirah, which explores the relationship between the Hebrew alphabet and the world it shapes.
Schonning’s work has appeared in Orion Magazine, Poetry Magazine, The Yale Review, Poetry Daily and elsewhere. He received Crazyhorse’s 2020 Lynda Hull Memorial Prize, judged by Cyrus Cassells, and won Omnidawn’s 2023 Single Poem Broadside Contest, judged by Nathalie Khankan. His work was also featured in Best New Poets 2024.
Schonning joined the English and Creative Writing Department in 2021 and became Director of Debate in 2024. He earned a degree in creative writing and international relations from HWS and an MFA from Colorado State University.
