Beth Ann Fennelly

Beth Ann Fennelly lives in Oxford with her husband and three children and teaches poetry and nonfiction writing at the University of Mississippi.  Fennelly has published three full-length poetry books.  Her first, Open House, won The 2001 Kenyon Review Prize, the Great Lakes College Association New Writers Award, and was a Book Sense Top Ten Poetry Pick.  It was reissued by W. W. Norton in 2009.  Her second book, Tender Hooks, and her third, Unmentionables, were published by W. W. Norton in 2004 and 2008.   She has also published a book of nonfiction, Great with Child, in 2006, with Norton.  As a Contributing Editor to The Oxford American, she frequently writes essays on Southern food, music, and books.  In 2011, she was named Mississippi Humanities Teacher of the Year and College of Liberal Arts Teacher of the Year.

• University of Notre Dame, B.A. magna cum laude

• University of Arkansas, M.F.A.

• University of Wisconsin, Diane Middlebrook Fellowship

•College of Liberal Arts Teacher of the Year, 2011

•Fulbright to Brazil, 2009

•U.S. Artists Grant, 2007

•Grants from the State of Illinois Arts Council in poetry, the Mississippi Arts Commission in Poetry (2010) and Nonfiction (2006) and the National Endowment for the Arts in poetry (2002).

•Fellowships from Bread Loaf and Sewanee Writers Conferences, residency from MacDowell.

•Winner of a Pushcart Prize and three times included in The Best American Poetry series.

•Read poetry at the Library of Congress at the invitation of the U.S. Poet Laureate.