J.D. Scrimgeour is the inaugural poet laureate of Salem, Massachusetts. He has lived in the city since 1996 with his wife, Eileen FitzGerald. One ancestor in his direct line, Mary Town Eastey, was put to death in Salem during the Witch Trials, and another was on the jury that found her guilty. Scrimgeour has written extensively about Salem, and his collection, Poet in High Street Park: Prose & Poetry for Modern Salem, contains three decades of his writing about the city.

Scrimgeour’s personal essays and poetry often focus on education, exploring what constitutes authentic learning in the exchange between student and teacher. Learning was a major theme in Themes For English B: A Professor’s Education In & Out of Class, which won the AWP Award for Nonfiction.

Among his six books of poetry is the bilingual 香蕉面包 Banana Bread, written as a way to practice learning Mandarin during the Covid pandemic. That work dovetails with recent work leading the Ginling Collective, a group of Chinese and American scholars and writers who translate poetry together. Scrimgeour’s interest in China is also seen in many poems in his latest collection, Small, Rectangular, Reflected World.

He also has published literary work on sports, especially basketball and baseball. He’s the author of the basketball memoir, Spin Moves, and his sports writing has appeared in various journals including the anthology Fast Break to Line Break: Poets on the Art of Basketball and Creative Nonfiction, where his essay “My Outfield,” won the magazine’s Writing about Baseball contest. He is interviewed about his sport writing in Sport Literate.

Much of his work is interdisciplinary, exploring connections between writing and other arts. He has collaborated with photographer Kim Mimnaugh and choreographer Caitlin Corbett. For several years, he and Philip Swanson have collaborated on Confluence a performance group blending poetry and music. He wrote the book and lyrics to Only Human, a musical that premiered in Salem Ames Hall Theater in 2014.

Scrimgeour has taught at Salem State University for over 30 years, where he has served as Chair of English, Coordinator of Creative Writing, First Year Experience Faculty Fellow, and Liaison for the University’s 1-2-1 dual-degree program with Nanjing Normal University in China. He has received the University’s Senior Award for Faculty, the Global Achievement Award from the Center for International Education, and the Martin Luther King Jr. Leadership Award for “outstanding and significant contributions to the causes of freedom, justice, and equality.”

His writing has won awards from the Academy of American Poets, Creative Nonfiction Magazine, the Massachusetts Cultural Council, the National Society of Arts & Letters, and the Salem Cultural Council. In 2023 the Worcester County Poetry Association named him the Gregory Stockmal Memorial Reader. He also received the Salem Athenaeum’s Edward Augustus Holyoke Award for “exemplary leadership cultivating a community of writers,” and he was awarded a 2025 writing residency at the T.S. Eliot House in Gloucester, Massachusetts.