W.F. Lantry is a poet, writer, and lifelong gardener whose work draws its breath from the rhythms of the natural world. Born in San Diego and shaped by a life of both scholarship and soil, he is the author of several widely acclaimed collections of poetry and fiction. His work has appeared in hundreds of journals and anthologies across the globe, earning numerous literary prizes and the admiration of readers for its clarity, musicality, and sensual grace.

Among his most beloved books are The Structure of Desire, a meditation on longing and embodiment; The Language of Birds, a luminous reinterpretation of Farid ud-Din Attar’s Conference of the Birds, in which mystical insight and poetic craft are held in delicate balance; and The Terraced Mountain, a collection that turns toward the sacred, exploring the spiritual dimensions of place, memory, and silence. In these pages, language ascends carefully, stone by stone, toward stillness and the possibility of revelation. His writing has always dwelt in that liminal space where the visible and the invisible touch—where garden, dream, and language conspire to reveal what is otherwise unspoken.

In The Cancer Diaries: Book One — Flood Warning, Lantry offers a searing and intimate account of his wife’s breast cancer diagnosis and treatment. These poems are not a chronicle of medicine, but of love—unyielding, terrified, and fiercely present. With clarity and tenderness, the collection bears witness to a shared ordeal, transforming anguish into art and vulnerability into strength. It is a book that does not flinch, and yet it offers hope, rooted in devotion and the fragile beauty of each passing moment.

For more than three decades, Lantry served as professor and administrator in universities across North America and Europe, teaching writing and literature, and later directing departments of academic technology with a vision that placed human creativity and student experience at the heart of digital innovation. His leadership helped reshape entire institutional landscapes, and his programs were recognized nationally for their excellence and integrity.

In recent years, he has stepped away from formal academia to devote himself more fully to what he calls his true curriculum: a regenerative garden nestled along the Rachel Carson Greenway Trail, just a few miles north of Washington, D.C. Here in Zone 8 Maryland, he tends koi ponds, doves, bananas, brugmansias, and a slowly maturing food forest designed around principles of permaculture and reverence. The garden is entirely organic, nurtured by aged wood chips, rain, and patience—no pesticides, no shortcuts, no cruelty.

This garden, and the life that unfolds within it, is not a retreat from poetry but its flowering. It is a place where language is composed not only on the page, but in the shifting light, the murmuration of starlings, the scent of an opening fig leaf. Lantry continues to write, to publish, and to share glimpses of this quiet, radiant world through his site One Poet’s Garden, as well as through Instagram and BlueSky.

In the end, his work is an offering: to those who listen for the secret music in a falling petal, to those who believe that poetry is not a product but a way of walking through the world..