Lucas Hunt

Lucas Allen Hunt (born November 2, 1976, Davenport, Iowa) is the president of HUNT Auctioneers and a celebrated American poet. He is a graduate of World Wide College of Auctioneering, member of the National Auctioneer’s Association, and holds the Benefit Auctioneer Specialist (BAS) designation.

Lucas Hunt by Carlos Martín

HUNT grew up in a Grant Wood Iowa landscape of baseball parks, barnyard barbecues, and Lutheran Sunday school. The son of an oil well driller, Hunt dropped out of college and wandered the United States, Mexico, and Europe. In Paris, he lived in an apartment above Shakespeare & Company Bookstore. In Wales, he studied at Swansea University. Along his journey, he worked on a pig farm, washed semi-trailer trucks, bartended at an American Legion Hall, and served as a park ranger.

He studied psychology and journalism at The University of Iowa, and attended the Iowa Writer's Workshop. While there, he worked as a police beat reporter for The Daily Iowan newspaper. He studied in the MFA program at Southampton College[1] on Long Island. His debut collection of poetry, Lives (2006, Vagabond Press)[2] was published to critical acclaim. The Midwest Book Review praised his "spot-on accurate cross-section of insights into the uniqueness of not only individual life, but also the seemingly commonplace phenomena that affect it." The Southampton Press called HUNT's poetry "a kind of Keatsean ardor underlying Elliotesque grapplings with the existential void."

HUNT has published work in The New York Times, East Hampton Star, Catapult, Slice and received a John Steinbeck Award for poetry.[2] His second book of poetry, Light on the Concrete (2011, North Sea Press),[3] was praised by The Literate Man Review for "its treatment of every day subjects, which HUNT's precise and beautiful language infuses with feeling that we all recognize and share." He is the author of IOWA (2016, Thane & Prose)[4] and HAMPTONS (2019, Thane & Prose), the first two volumes of a five-book series about places of inspiration in the epic style. The next volume is NEW YORK (2020), followed by PARIS and ROME.

He is the former Director of Orchard Literary, a Manhattan based literary agency that represents a select group of top experts and authors. Prior to that, HUNT served as Rights Manager for the Philip G. Spitzer Literary Agency,[5] where he worked with best-selling authors Michael Connelly, James Lee Burke, Andre Dubus III, and Simon Van Booy. HUNT closed major print, audio, digital and foreign language deals. He went on to found Hunt & Light, an independent poetry publisher that released *****Original Message***** by Matthew Frazier (2013), and Constellations by Esther Mathieu (2015).

In 2017, he formed HUNT Auctioneers to serve non-profit organizations and help grow their fundraising. HUNT Auctioneers collect and analyze historical data to create an original strategy for live and virtual events. They apply knowledge from years of study and practice in the field of philanthropy, and transform the gala into a theater of giving. HUNT Auctioneers have helped raise hundreds of millions of dollars and awareness for non-profit organizations.

He is a former resident of Springs, New York,[6] currently lives in Long Island City, Queens, and serves on the board for The Poetry Society of New York.