Beth Ann Fennelly is one of America’s most accomplished and widely published poets and is admired not only for her writing talent but also for her polished and moving appearances as a performance artist. In the last several years she has expanded her horizons and has become an exceptional essayist. Ms. Fennelly judged the Essay Category of the 2010 William Faulkner – William Wisdom Creative Writing Competition.
An excellent example of her own talent as an essayist is Beth Ann Fennelly Digs Into Geophagy, published in the March issue of the Oxford American. (http://www.oxfordamerican.org/articles/2010/mar/09/wide-world-eating-dirt/) Her collection of essays, Great with Child: Letters to a Young Mother was published recently and are accurately described as modern letters written in an old-fashioned way, not as hasty e-mails but more slowly and filtered through the sensibility of a spirited, fearless poet. Though written for a specific person, their themes are universal, inviting all mothers to join the grand circle of giving and receiving advice about children. More comments:
Captures the doubts and frustrations as well as the joys of motherhood....Her missives are alternately moving, funny, and practical, with an unusual honesty about just how hard it is to be a young mother.
— Margo Hammond, St. Petersburg Times
My wife and I read Great with Child in the middle of a particularly sleepless and challenging time in our daughter's life; we found ourselves instantly calmed and reassured....A wise and deeply honest book—one that any parent or expecting parent needs to read.”
— Dean Bakopolous, author of Please Don't Come Back from the Moon
May be the best book ever to give for a baby shower.
—Tampa Tribune
Recent books of poetry include The Kudzu Chronicles and Unmentionables: Poems. To hear Ms. Fennelly read from The Kudzu Chronicles, go to You Tube. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q_1UX8HEEdY) In Unmentionables, Ms Fennelly questions our everyday human foibles with elegant word play and subversive wit. Book List had this to say about this book: Incouciant, sexy, funny, and dead-on…a startlingly empathetic series of concise and slashing poems.
Paste Magazine said:
Beth Ann Fennelly’s best poems are as noisy as a rat in a coffee can: They twitch, scramble and all but turn themselves inside out on the page. A classier way to put it is that the poems are over-determined, like dreams. Freud observed that dreams have more than one cause, which is what makes them action-packed; the same is true for poetry. In Fennelly’s best work, you get an entire bookful of images in just a page or two. (http://www.pastemagazine.com/articles/2008/03/beth-ann-fennelly.html)
Ms. Fennelly was born on May 21, 1971, in New Jersey but grew up in Lake Forest, IL. She obtained her B.A. magna cum laude in 1993 from the University of Notre Dame. After graduation, Ms. Fennelly taught English in a coal-mining village on the Czech/Polish border. When she returned to the States, she earned the M.F.A. degree in poetry from the University of Arkansas. She then received the 1999 Diane Middlebrook Fellowship from the University of Wisconsin. She was also the recipient of an Illinois Arts Council Grant. She became an Assistant Professor of English and taught poetry at Knox College in Galesburg, IL. Her chapbook, A Different Kind of Hunger, published by the Texas Review Press, won the 1997 Texas Review Breakthrough Award. Her poems have appeared in The American Scholar, The Kenyon Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Shenandoah, and TriQuarterly; they have been anthologized Poets of the New Century, The Penguin Book of the Sonnet: 500 Years of a Classic Tradition in English,, The Best American Poetry 1996, The Pushcart Prize 2001 and others. Fennelly's book of poems, Open House, and other works have won numerous awards, including the 2001 Kenyon Review Prize in Poetry. Open House was a Book Sense Top Ten poetry pick.
Her 2004 book, Tender Hooks, was published by W. W. Norton & Company. In 2002, Ms. Fennelly was among only 38 writers to receive the National Endowment for the Arts Grant. Hers is a notable Creative Writing Fellowship in Poetry. There were 1,600 applicants and each of the 28 winning fellows received $20,000. Fennelly used the award to help her put final touches on Tender Hooks. She was quoted in the Clarion-Ledger as saying that the book "takes on the subject of motherhood from a lot of different angles." The inspiration for the collection of 25 poems was Fennelly's daughter Claire, who was 19 month’s old when the book was written.The poems explore the changes in her life with her husband following Claire's birth. Some of the poems in the book are informal, one is a Shakespearean sonnet, and one is a 12-page experimental poem. In addition, a long poem called Telling the Gospel Truth appeared in the Kenyon Review. Tender Hooks was praised by Albert Goldbarth for its “deep smarts, high spirits, and dead-on kick-ass language.” To read an interview with Beth Ann about Tender Hooks and how it was conceived, go to: http://www.curledup.com/intfenn.htm. The interview is highly recommended for developing poets, as is an article she wrote for Poets.org, On Poetry and the Reallocation of Concentration: Learning to Forget. (http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/5907)
Currently Ms. Fennelly resides in Oxford, MS, with her husband, fiction writer Tom Franklin, and their children. She teaches English at the University of Mississippi. Her advice for future writers is:
It is of the utmost importance to read constantly, and read aloud. I tell that to my students all the time. There’s not a lot that can help them get better quicker than reading poetry aloud, their own and that of others everyday.
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