Tony Crunk is an American poet whose first volume of poetry, Living in the Resurrection, won the Yale Series of Younger Poets Competition.
Crunk was born in Hopkinsville, Kentucky. [1] He received his B.A. at Centre College, [2] an M.A. in philosophy at University of Kentucky, and an M.A. in literature and M.F.A. in creative writing from the University of Virginia.
Crunk has taught at the University of Virginia, James Madison University, Murray State University (Kentucky), the University of Montana, Samford University, and University of Alabama Birmingham, [3] where he administers the Alabama Writers' Forum. [4] In 1997, he was awarded one of eight Writer's Community Residence Awards. [5] In 2008, Crunk was chosen to represent Kentucky at the Library of Congress Poetry at Noon series. [6]
In 1994, his first collection of poetry, Living in the Resurrection, published in 1995, won that year's Yale Series of Younger Poets Competition. [6] In the foreword, James Dickey noted that these poems spoke of a "quest" for a spiritual home, which Dickey located in the American South, the art being that of "Southern gospel music and homiletics." [7] The theme of an odyssey is echoed by critic Steve Harris. [8] In a lengthy review of Crunk's work, critic Vincent King states that Dickey's conception of Crunk's art is a misreading (perhaps caused by Dickey's failing health in 1994), and that rather the tension between Crunk's Christian heritage and his rejection of his Southern Baptism is the key to the interpretation of the poems. [9]
Crunk's 2010 New Covenant Bound is a collection of poems inspired by the displacement between 1935 and 1969 of some 20,000 inhabitants in order to create the Land Between the Lakes (then known as Land Between the Rivers) between the Cumberland and Tennessee rivers in western Kentucky and Tennessee. [1] The collection centers around how the US federal government's seizure of this land affected the narrator's family. [10]
Robert Penn Warren was an American poet, novelist, and literary critic and was one of the founders of New Criticism. He was also a charter member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers. He founded the literary journal The Southern Review with Cleanth Brooks in 1935. He received the 1947 Pulitzer Prize for the Novel for All the King's Men (1946) and the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1958 and 1979. He is the only person to have won Pulitzer Prizes for both fiction and poetry.
James Lafayette Dickey was an American poet and novelist. He was appointed the eighteenth United States Poet Laureate in 1966. He also received the Order of the South award.
Louise Elisabeth Glück was an American poet and essayist. She won the 2020 Nobel Prize in Literature, whose judges praised "her unmistakable poetic voice that with austere beauty makes individual existence universal". Her other awards include the Pulitzer Prize, National Humanities Medal, National Book Award, National Book Critics Circle Award, and Bollingen Prize. From 2003 to 2004, she was Poet Laureate of the United States.
Rita Frances Dove is an American poet and essayist. From 1993 to 1995, she served as Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress. She is the first African American to have been appointed since the position was created by an act of Congress in 1986 from the previous "consultant in poetry" position (1937–86). Dove also received an appointment as "special consultant in poetry" for the Library of Congress's bicentennial year from 1999 to 2000. Dove is the second African American to receive the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, in 1987, and she served as the Poet Laureate of Virginia from 2004 to 2006. Since 1989, she has been teaching at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, where she held the chair of Commonwealth Professor of English from 1993 to 2020; as of 2020, she holds the chair of Henry Hoyns Professor of Creative Writing.
Robert L. Hass is an American poet. He served as Poet Laureate of the United States from 1995 to 1997. He won the 2007 National Book Award and shared the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for the collection Time and Materials: Poems 1997–2005. In 2014 he was awarded the Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets.
James Still was an American poet, novelist and folklorist. He lived most of his life in a log house along the Dead Mare Branch of Little Carr Creek, Knott County, Kentucky. He was best known for the novel River of Earth, which depicted the struggles of coal mining in eastern Kentucky.
William Morris Meredith Jr. was an American poet and educator. He was Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 1978 to 1980, and the recipient of the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.
—From Robert Frost's "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening", first published this year in his collection New Hampshire
"Mending Wall" is a poem by Robert Frost. It opens Robert's second collection of poetry, North of Boston, published in 1914 by David Nutt, and has become "one of the most anthologized and analyzed poems in modern literature".
Anthony Dey Hoagland was an American poet. His poetry collection, What Narcissism Means to Me (2003), was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. His other honors included two grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, a 2000 Guggenheim Fellowship in Poetry, and a fellowship to the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center. His poems and criticism have appeared in such publications as Poetry Magazine, Ploughshares, AGNI, Threepenny Review, The Gettysburg Review, Ninth Letter, Southern Indiana Review, American Poetry Review and Harvard Review.
Jared Carter is an American poet and editor.
Joy Harjo is an American poet, musician, playwright, and author. She served as the 23rd United States Poet Laureate, the first Native American to hold that honor. She was also only the second Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to have served three terms. Harjo is a member of the Muscogee Nation and belongs to Oce Vpofv. She is an important figure in the second wave of the literary Native American Renaissance of the late 20th century. She studied at the Institute of American Indian Arts, completed her undergraduate degree at University of New Mexico in 1976, and earned an MFA degree at the University of Iowa in its creative writing program.
Maurice Manning is an American poet. His first collection of poems, Lawrence Booth's Book of Visions, was awarded the Yale Younger Poets Award, chosen by W.S. Merwin. Since then he has published four collections of poetry. He teaches English and Creative Writing at Transylvania University in Lexington, Kentucky, where he oversees the Judy Gaines Young Book Award, and is a member of the poetry faculty of the Warren Wilson College MFA Program for Writers.
John Bensko is an American poet who taught in the MFA program at the University of Memphis, along with his wife, the fiction writer Cary Holladay.
William Hobart Dickey was an American poet and professor of English and creative writing at San Francisco State University. He wrote 15 books of poetry over a career that lasted over 30 years.
Tony Sanders was an American poet.
Sabra Loomis is an Irish-American poet. Her most recent poetry collection is House Held Together by Winds, winner of the 2007 National Poetry Series. Her honors include Yaddo and MacDowell Colony fellowships. Her poems have appeared in literary journals and magazines including American Poetry Review, American Voice, Cincinnati Poetry Review, Cyphers, Florida Review, Heliotrope, Lumina, Negative Capability, Poetry Ireland Review, Salamander, Salt Hill Journal, and St. Ann's Review. She is the daughter of Alfred Loomis of Tuxedo Park, New York. She graduated from New York University. She teaches at the University of Massachusetts Boston, and was on the faculty of the Poets' House, Donegal. She divides her time between New York City, and Achill Island, Ireland.
Brenda Marie Osbey is an American poet. She served as the Poet Laureate of Louisiana from 2005 to 2007.
Nikky Finney is an American poet. She was the Guy Davenport Endowed Professor of English at the University of Kentucky for twenty years. In 2013, she accepted a position at the University of South Carolina as the John H. Bennett, Jr. Chair in Southern Letters and Literature. An alumna of Talladega College, and author of four books of poetry and a short-story cycle, Finney is an advocate for social justice and cultural preservation. Her honors include the 2011 National Book Award for her collection Head Off & Split.
Bennie Lee Sinclair was an American poet, novelist, and short story writer. She was named by Governor Richard Wilson Riley as the fifth South Carolina Poet Laureate from 1986 to 2000.