David Mason was born and raised in Bellingham, Washington. He studied briefly at the Colorado College, but left after one year to work as a fisherman in Alaska. He returned to the college to earn his B.A. in 1978. Mason and then-wife, Jonna Heinrich, moved to Rochester, New York, where he worked as a gardener. In 1980 they went to Greece, where they lived for just over a year in Kardamyli, Greece, in the Mani district of southernmost part of the Peloponnesus. While living there he became the friend the British travel author and war hero, Patrick Leigh Fermor. Mason returned to the United States when he was hired to write the screenplay for a film based on a novel he had written. In the end the film was canceled when the production company closed its film division.
After a part-time teaching stint at Colorado College, he began studying at the University of Rochester under Anthony Hecht. His first marriage ended, and in 1988 he married Scottish photojournalist Anne Lennox. He received his doctorate from The University of Rochester and moved to Moorhead, Minnesota, where he taught at Minnesota State University Moorhead for ten years. Wilson spent the academic year of 1996-97 in Greece on a Fulbright fellowship, where he continued to perfect his Greek, meet Greek intellectuals and writers, translate and write, and visit old places from 16 years earlier. In 1998, Mason returned to his alma mater, Colorado College, where he now co-directs the Creative Writing program. In 2010 Mason was named Colorado Poet Laureate. Press Release: Names David Mason as CO's 7th Poet Laureate He and wife Lennox live in Colorado Springs, Colorado.
David Mason’s collections of poems include The Buried Houses (winner of the Nicholas Roerich Poetry Prize) and The Country I Remember (winner of the Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award). He is coeditor of four major anthologies and has authored dozens of poems, essays, reviews, translations, stories and memoirs. An advisory editor at the Hudson Review, the Sewanee Review and Divide, Mason’s work can be found in such periodicals as The New Yorker, Harper’s, The Nation, The New Republic, The New York Times, The Times Literary Supplement, Poetry, Agenda, Modern Poetry in Translation, The New Criterion, Yale Review, The Hudson Review, The American Scholar, The Irish Times, and The Southern Review.