Tony Tost

Tony Tost (born 1975) is an American poet, critic and screenwriter. His first poetry book Invisible Bride won the 2003 Walt Whitman Award judged by C.D. Wright.

Tost was born in Springfield, Missouri, and raised in Enumclaw, Washington. He is a graduate of both Green River Community College in Auburn, Washington and College of the Ozarks in Point Lookout, Missouri. Tost graduated with a Master of Fine Arts degree from the University of Arkansas. He also holds a Ph.D. in English from Duke University.

He 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.

In 2011, Tost's book on Johnny Cash's American Recordings was published by Continuum Books in their 33 1/3 series on classic albums. Critic Joshua Scheiderman wrote that Tost's book "ultimately belongs in the long, rich tradition of texts like Constance Rourke’s American Humor: A Study of the National Character (1931) and Greil Marcus’s The Old, Weird America: The World of Bob Dylan’s Basement Tapes (1997), ostensibly academic studies of American culture but also works of mythopoesis in their own right."

Tost is the creator, executive producer, and showrunner of Damnation, debuting October 2017 on USA Network and Netflix. Before that, Tost was a writer and producer for five seasons on the A&E and Netflix television series Longmire. He currently lives in Los Angeles, California.