Southern Poetry Anthology, Volume IX: Virginia Volume 9

Home to extraordinary writers such as William Styron, Tom Wolfe, and Ellen Glasgow, the state of Virginia’s literary past is among the most prolific in the nation. Indeed, this state, with its beautiful and varied ecosystems—Appalachia, Chesapeake Bay, the Shenandoah Valley, and Virginia’s beautiful beaches, just to name a few—seem to serve as the landscapes from which equally varied and nutritive writers spring, from the lyrical, often ecstatic meditations of Charles Wright to the poignant, dynamic narratives and lyrics of Ellen Bryant Voigt, from the moving narratives of Rita Dove to the formal mastery and wit of R. T. Smith. Series Editor William Wright, along with Volume Editors J. Bruce Fuller, Jesse Graves, and Amy Wright, have collaborated to bring readers a wide-ranging survey in The Southern Poetry Anthology, Volume IX: Virginia. This volume seeks to emphasize the uniqueness of the poetic voices of Virginia. In doing so, the editors have acknowledged and included many celebrated writers from the recent past as well as relatively new, diverse voices that reiterate the literary fecundity of one of the most beautiful, revered, and complicated states in the American South.

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.