LUCAS 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 The University of Swansea. 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.
 
Hunt was selected to attend the undergraduate Iowa Poetry 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 on Long Island. His debut collection of poetry, Lives, was published to critical acclaim in 2006 by Vagabond Press. 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."
 
His work has been published in The New York Times, East Hampton Star, Red Branch, Catapult, The Southampton Review, Clarion, Slice, Denimskin, Fiction Writers Review, among others, and received The John Steinbeck Award for Poetry. His second book of poetry, Light on the Concrete, was published in 2011 by The North Sea Press. The Literate Man Review said "Light on the Concrete has received accolades for its treatment of every day subjects, which Hunt's precise and beautiful language infuses with feeling that we all recognize and share."

In 2016, Thane & Prose published IOWA, the first in a five-book series that traces the poet’s progress through places of inspiration in an epic fashion. N. Thane Boulton said “It is my sure view that Mr. Hunt's body of work will elevate the form of poetry—while ushering in an American voice as vivid, vast and confident as America itself.” The following volumes are HAMPTONS (2019), NEW YORK (2022), PARIS and ROME.
 
Lucas Hunt is the president of HUNT Philanthropy. He has helped raise millions of dollars and awareness for non-profit organizations, graduated from World Wide College of Auctioneering, and holds the coveted Benefit Auctioneer Specialist (BAS) designation Lucas is a member of the National Auctioneer’s Association, and serves on the board for The Poetry Society of New York.