About the author

WILLIAM WRIGHT’s biggest joy in life is teaching and guiding others in their writing pursuits, as well as writing himself. Wright is author or editor of twenty-three nationally and internationally distributed books: seven full-length books, including Grass Chapels: New & Selected Poems (Mercer University Press, 2021) and four chapbooks, including April Creatures (Blue Horse Press, 2016). He also has two books, a novel and a distinct book of poems, under contract.

Wright has collaborated with writers and scholars Jesse Graves and Amy Wright, as well as the artist, Emoni Viruet, on book and lecturing projects, and his poems and books have garnered praise in many venues, including The Los Angeles Review of Books. Wright has published in journals such as Oxford American, Kenyon Review, Shenandoah, Southern Poetry Review, Terrain.org, North American Review, Rattle, and myriad other magazines and literary journals.

Wright is series editor and volume co-editor of The Southern Poetry Anthology (Texas Review Press), a multivolume celebration of contemporary Southern writers. He is co-editor (with Daniel Cross Turner) of the critically acclaimed Hard Lines: Rough South Poetry (The University of South Carolina Press); and Wright co-edited (with Daniel Westover) an anthology of poems centered on the Victorian poet, Gerard Manley Hopkins (Clemson University Press & University of Liverpool Press).

His nonfiction appears in Shenandoah, Asheville Poetry Review, and in a forthcoming book published by Routledge centered on the digital humanities.

His work has won the Appalachian Book of the Year Award, the Georgia Author of the Year Award, the Georgia Editor of the Year Award, the Terrain.org Grand Prize, the Porter Fleming Prize in Literature, the South Carolina Poetry Initiative Prize, and many other honors.

Wright has taught creative writing and literature at Oxford College of Emory University, Emory University, The University of Tennessee Knoxville (as Writer-in-Residence), Reinhardt University, and directed masterclasses at over twenty universities throughout the United States.

Wright earned a Ph.D. in Creative Writing (Poetry) and American Literature (while studying British Literature independently) at the University of Southern Mississippi’s Center for Writers, where he was selected as a Center for Writers Excellence in Teaching Fellow.

A lover of surrealist visual art, British comedy, and the study of cosmology, he is a devotee of the music of J. S. Bach, as well as other music of the Baroque era. He gave a recent lecture at Reinhardt University on “three-part” ekphrasis and collaboration, which combined visual art, the music of Bach, and poetry.