Born in South Bend, Indiana, in 1931, John Engels attended the University of Notre Dame, graduating in 1952 with an AB in English. After three years in the Navy, he went on to University College, Dublin, where he studied Anglo-Irish Literature, and then to the Iowa Writers' Workshops, from which he graduated with an M.F.A. in 1957. After five years at St. Norbert College in West DePere, Wisconsin, he joined the English faculty at St. Michael's College in Colchester, Vermont, where he has taught since 1962. He has been a lecturer at Sweet Briar College, Randolph-Macon Woman's College, Middlebury College, and Emory University, as well as at the University of Alabama. In 1995 he was Wyndham Robertson Chair in Creative Writing, at Hollins College. Since 1975 in collaboration with David Huddle, he has conducted the Spring Writing Workshop at the University of Vermont. He was Frost Fellow at Bread Loaf Writers Conference in 1976, and has received two National Endowment for the Arts grants, a Guggenheim Fellowship (1980), a Fulbright Fellowship (Yugoslavia, 1985), as well as a Rockefeller Foundation residency at Bellagio in 1991. In 1997 he received a National YMCA Residency Fellowship. He was resident poet at the Frost Place in 1988, and later Frost Place Fellow at Annaghmakerrig, in Ireland. Weather-Fear (University of Georgia Press) was a Pulitzer finalist in 1983, and Cardinals in the Ice Age (Graywolf Press) an American Poetry Series selection in 1987.

Engels is a contributing editor to The Hollins Critic, and a member of the Frost Place Advisory Board. His most recent books include Walking to Cootehill (Middlebury/University Press of New England, 1992), Big Water (Lyons & Burford, 1994), and Sinking Creek (Lyons Books, 1997). In October the University of Notre Dame Press will publish House and Garden.