04-16-19 | Songs for Listening | Tony Tost
Poet, critic, screenwriter & TV producer, Tony Tost, picked tunes for Tuesday, April 16 at Songs for Listening.Tony's first book of poetry Invisible Bride won the 2003 Walt Whitman Award, judged by C.D. Wright. He is the creator, executive producer, and showrunner of Damnation, a period drama about the labor wars in America during the 1930s that aired for a single season on USA Network.
Tony was born in Springfield, MO and grew up in a series of single and double-wide trailers in and around Enumclaw, WA. Tony is a graduate of both Green River Community College in Auburn, WA and College of the Ozarks in Point Lookout, MO. After his undergraduate education, Tost completed an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Arkansas. He then took his Ph.D. in English from Duke, writing his dissertation on the poetics Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein.
In 2011, Tony's book Johnny Cash's American Recordings was published by Continuum Books in their 33 1/3 series on classic albums. Soon thereafter Tony moved to LA becoming a writer / producer on the A&E and Netflix television series Longmire. His script The Olympian about Brad Alan Lewis's quest for the 1984 Olympics was selected for the 2016 Black List ranking of the film industry's best unproduced screenplays.
Tony was the creator, executive producer, and showrunner of Damnation, a period drama about the labor wars in America during the 1930s. Damnation debuted November 2017 on USA Network. Tony described the show as: "1/3 Clint Eastwood, 1/3 John Steinbeck, 1/3 James Ellroy. That is, it takes some characters you’d normally see in a tough western, plops them in the world of Grapes of Wrath and places them in the sort of pulpy paranoid narrative you see in Ellroy’s novels."
'My Rifle, My Pony & Me' by Rick Nelson & Dean Martin from 'Rio Bravo Soundtrack'
'Love's Endless War' by Don Williams from 'Portrait'
'Me & Magdalena' by The Monkees from 'Good Times!'
'Hard On a Heart' by Ashley Monroe from 'Sparrow'
'Til I Can Make It on My Own' by Tammy Wynette from 'Til I Can Make It on My Own'
