Beth Ann Fennelly

Beth Ann Fennelly is the author of three poetry collections: Unmentionables (W.W. Norton, 2008), Tender Hooks (W.W. Norton, 2004), and Open House (Zoo Press, 2002), winner of the 2001 Kenyon Review Prize and the Great Lakes College Association New Writers Award and a Book Sense Top Ten Poetry Pick. She is also the author of the nonfiction book Great with Child: Letters to a Young Mother (W.W. Norton, 2007) and coauthor (with her husband, Tom Franklin) of the novel The Tilted World (HarperCollins, 2014). Her sixth book, Heating & Cooling: 52 Micro-Memoirs (W.W. Norton, 2017), was named an Atlanta Journal Constitution Best Book, a Goodreaders Favorite for 2017, and the winner of the Housatonic Book Prize. 

A former Diane Middlebrook Fellow at the University of Wisconsin, Fennelly has won grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the United States Artists, and a Fulbright to Brazil to study the poetry of Elizabeth Bishop. Her work has won a Pushcart Prize, the Wood Award from the Carolina Quarterly, the Black Warrior Review Poetry Contest, and three times been included in The Best American Poetry Series. She was the first woman honored with the University of Notre Dame’s Distinguished Alumni in the Arts Award.

Fennelly is the former poet laureate of Mississippi and teaches in the MFA Program at the University of Mississippi, where she was named Outstanding Teacher of the Year. She and her husband Tom Franklin live in Oxford with their three children.