Beth Ann Fennelly


Beth Ann Fennelly is an American poet and prose writer and is the Poet Laureate of Mississippi.

Biography

She was born in New Jersey and raised in Lake Forest, Illinois. She attended Woodlands Academy of the Sacred Heart in Lake Forest, graduating in 1989. She earned a B.A. magna cum laude from the University of Notre Dame in 1993. After graduation, she taught English for a year in a coal mining city on the Czech/Polish border. She later earned an MFA from the University of Arkansas, followed by the Diane Middlebrook Fellowship at the University of Wisconsin. She taught poetry at Knox College for two years. Since 2001, she's taught poetry and non-fiction at the University of Mississippi, where she has won several teaching awards, including Outstanding Liberal Arts Teacher of the Year and the University of Mississippi Humanities Teacher of the Year.
Fennelly's first collection of poems, Open House, won multiple awards, including the Zoo Press Poetry Prize, the 2001 Kenyon Review Prize, the Great Lakes Colleges Association Award, and a Book Sense Top Ten Poetry Pick. Her poems have been included in numerous anthologies, including three editions of The Best American Poetry. She received a grant from the National Endowment of the Arts in 2002 and she has also won a Pushcart Prize. In 2009, she received a Fulbright grant to Brazil to study the poetry of Elizabeth Bishop. Her second and third books of poetry, Tender Hooks and Unmentionables, were published by W. W. Norton.
Fennelly is a contributor to The Oxford American, where her essays frequently feature the topics of Southern food, music, and books. Her essays have appeared in Ploughshares, Poets & Writers, Ecotone, and The Virginia Quarterly Review. The Society of American Travel Writers awarded her the Lowell Prize for her work in Southern Living. She published a book of essays, Great With Child: Letters to a Young Mother, in 2006.
Fennelly and her husband, Tom Franklin, co-authored a novel, The Tilted World, set during the 1927 flood of the Mississippi River. Published in 2013 by HarperCollins, it was named an IndieNext Great Read and a finalist for the 2014 SIBA Book Award and published in six foreign editions.
More recently, Fennelly has been writing flash nonfiction pieces in such magazines as Creative Nonfiction, The Southern Review,, The Normal School, Guernica, and The Missouri Review. Her collection, Heating & Cooling: 52 Micro-Memoirs, was published by W. W. Norton in fall of 2017. The Atlanta Journal Constitution named it a “Best Southern Book of 2017” and it was awarded the 2018 Housatonic Book Award in Nonfiction.
In August 2016, Fennelly was named the new Poet Laureate of Mississippi. In 2020, she was named an Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellow.
She is married to novelist Tom Franklin and they have three children. They live in Oxford, Mississippi.

Selected works

Essays

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