Home of the first settlement in the United States and known as Old Dominion and The Mother of Presidents, the state of Virginia's artistic output proves among the most fecund in the nation, evidenced in this ninth volume of The Southern Poetry Anthology. This collection includes well-known, established, and celebrated poets such as Charles Wright, Claudia Emerson, Gregory Orr, Ellen Bryant Voigt, R. T. Smith, Forrest Gander, and Rita Dove, and the editors have dedicated equal focus on newer, diverse poets who continue to broaden and enrich the literary legacy of this beautiful state.
WILLIAM WRIGHT is author or editor of over twenty nationally published books, with several forthcoming. Most recently, Wright published Grass Chapels: New & Selected Poems with Mercer University Press in 2021. Wright has been named the Georgia Author of the Year, the Georgia Editor of the Year, and won the Terrain.org Grand Prize. Wright was named Writer-in-Residence at the University of Tennessee in 2016 and Visiting Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at Emory University and Oxford College of Emory from 2017-2020.
J. BRUCE FULLER is the author of
The Dissenter's Ground,
Lancelot, and
Flood, and his poems have appeared at
The Southern Review, Crab Orchard Review, McNeese Review, Birmingham Poetry Review, and
Louisiana Literature, among others. He has received scholarships from Bread Loaf, the Sewanee Writers' Conference, and Stanford University, where he was a Wallace Stegner Fellow. He currently teaches at Sam Houston State University where he is Director of Texas Review Press.
AMY WRIGHT is the current Wayne G. Basler Chair of Excellence at East Tennessee State University. Her nonfiction debut,
Paper Concert: A Conversation in the Round, published in 2021 with Sarabande Books. She has also authored three poetry books, six chapbooks, and received two Peter Taylor Fellowships to the
Kenyon Review Writers Workshop, an Individual Artist Grant from the Tennessee Arts Commission, and a fellowship to the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.
JESSE GRAVES grew up in Sharps Chapel, Tennessee, where his ancestors settled in the 1780s. He is the author of several books, including
Tennessee Landscape with Blighted Pine,
Basin Ghosts,
Specter Mountain, and has edited several volumes of poetry and scholarship, including
The Southern Poetry Anthology and
Conversations with Robert Morgan. Graves received the 2014 Philip H. Freund Prize for Creative Writing from Cornell University, and the 2015 James Still Award for Writing about the Appalachian South from the Fellowship of Southern Writers. In 2015, he was inducted into the East Tennessee Writers Hall of Fame. Graves completed his MFA in Poetry Writing from Cornell University, and PhD in English from The University of Tennessee. He is Professor of English and Poet-in-Residence at East Tennessee State University.
