J. David Cummings worked as a theoretical physicist at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory for more than ten years. Some years later, after visiting the Hiroshima Memorial Peace Park, he began writing the poems that culminated in his book, Tancho, which Alicia Ostriker chose to win the Ashland Poetry Press Richard Snyder Publication Prize in 2013. His long poem, "Praise Dust" was one of five selected for honors by the W.B. Yeats Society of New York in its 2018 annual competition. Judge Leslie McGrath said of the poem that it "...conjures out of lush sounds the smallness of the self when backgrounded by eternity." His poems, whether interrogating the world-historical event of the atomic bombings and their long aftermath, delving deeply into the mysteries of human psychology (sometimes with metaphors stolen from physics), or re-membering his own complex and difficult family history, are heart-centered, searingly honest, and layered with multiple meanings. He believes poems must have music, passion, and beauty, and strives to imbue his work with those qualities. He lives in Menlo Park, California with his wife Christine and a house full of books.