David Anthony Sam was born and spent his childhood in McKeesport PA, a coal and steel suburb of Pittsburgh. His home at the end of 36th Street abutted a woods, and the games he played on that street and the time he spent in those woods all influenced his poetry as well as his sense of the holistic ecology of all things. His neighborhood was filled with immigrants and children of immigrants, and his grandparents themselves came from Poland and Syria.

In 1961, the family moved with his father’s factory to Belleville, MI, a far suburb of Detroit. Small town life near a lake and the rural farm fields and woods within a short walk along the railroad tracks also appear much of his verse.

A first-generation college student and graduate of Eastern Michigan University and Michigan State University, Sam has taught creative writing, English literature, and composition at EMU, Marygrove College, Oakland Community College, and Pensacola State College. He was partner/manager of Gondolier Music & Electronics from 1972-1985 in Belleville before moving into higher education as an administrator.

With his wife and life partner, Linda, he lives now in Locust Grove VA,  not far from the eastern mountain chain. They have two children, Michelle and Ryan, and three grandchildren. In June 2017, Sam retired as president of Germanna Community College. He currently serves on the Board of the Poetry Society of Virginia as Vice President for the North Central Region and teachers creative writing at Germanna Community College.

Sam’s latest collection, Stone Bird, was released in 2023 by San Francisco Bay Press. His collection, Writing the Significant Soil, won the 2021 Homebound Publications Poetry Prize and was published by Wayfarer Books in 2022.  Six other collections are in print: Memories in Clay, Dreams of Wolves (2014), Dark Land, White Light (1974, 2014), Early in the Day (2015) , Finite to Fail: Poems After Dickinson (2017 GFT Press Grand Prize Chapbook Winner), Final Inventory (Prolific Press 2018) and Dark Fathers (Kelsay Books 2019). An eighth collection, Stone Bird, is forthcoming in 2023 from San Francisco Bay Press.

His poems have appeared in over 100 journals and he was the featured writer in Light: A Journal of Photography and Poetry (2017) and The Hurricane Review (Spring 2016) which included 36 of his poems.  His poem “First and Last” win the Rebecca Lard Award in 2018 from Poetry Quarterly and his poems have twice been nominated for the Pushcart Prize.