Extended Bio | Beth Ann Fennelly
I have a prejudice—maybe you share it—against writers who publish in multiple genres; if they were serious, I somehow feel, they’d focus. Nevertheless, I’ve published three books of poetry, a collaborative novel, three books of non-fiction.
I started out with both feet planted firmly on the line break. Growing up in a suburb of Chicago, my first love was poetry, which I studied at the University of Notre Dame, earning my B.A. magna cum laude in 1993. After a year teaching English on the Czech/Polish border, I earned my MFA in poetry at the University of Arkansas in 1998. The following year I was the Diane Middlebrook Fellow in Poetry at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing. After my fellowship, I moved with my husband, Tom Franklin, to Galesburg, IL, to teach at Knox College. While there, I won a Pushcart Prize and an Illinois Arts Council Grant. I also finished my first book, Open House.
Open House won The Kenyon Review Prize, the Great Lakes College Association’s New Writer Award, and was a Book Sense Top Ten Poetry Pick. I had my first of three inclusions The Best American Poetry. Poems were republished in The Penguin Book of the Sonnet; Thirteen Ways of Looking for a Poem; Poets of the New Century; and Poetry Daily.
In 2001, I gave birth to a daughter, and we moved to Oxford, where I began teaching at The University of Mississippi. The poems that won a National Endowment for the Arts Award in 2003 became my second book, Tender Hooks. This collection, which received a starred BookList review, has gone through several printings and includes poems anthologized in The Best American Poetry 2005; 180 More: Extraordinary Poems for Every Day; Not for Mothers Only: Contemporary Poets on Child-Getting and Child Rearing; The Book of Irish American Poetry from the Eighteenth Century to the Present; Contemporary American Poetry; and Literature: A Pocket Anthology.
But, increasingly, I found myself writing essays; they appeared in Ploughshares, Virginia Quarterly Review, Orion, The Black Warrior Review, The Michigan Quarterly Review, Ecotone, Esquire, and The Oxford American. The next year, W. W. Norton published my first nonfiction book, Great With Child: Letters to a Young Mother, which has been translated into Spanish and Greek. Soon thereafter, I gave birth to our first son.
I returned to poetry for Unmentionables (W. W. Norton, 2008), which earned a starred BookList review and had poems reprinted in Efforts and Affections: Women Poets on Mentorship; Artifice and Marrow: An Anthology of Women Poets; Seriously Funny; and The Art of Losing: Poems of Grief and Healing. I was awarded a $50,000 grant from United States Artists, won The Black Warrior Review Poetry Contest, and was translated into Spanish for the NEA’s Lineas Connectadas.
In 2009, my first book was reissued by W. W. Norton. Later that year I won a Fulbright to Brazil to study the work of Elizabeth Bishop and teach at Universidade Federal do Minas Gerais.
Next, my husband and I collaborated on our third child and a novel. The Tilted World, published by William Morrow/HarperCollins, is set in the flood of the Mississippi River in 1927. Seven foreign editions were released and The Tilted World was an IndieNext Great Read for October 2013, a Southern Booksellers Association Fall Okra Pick, and a SIBA Finalist.
After finishing the novel, I began experimenting with the short-form nonfiction that became Heating & Cooling: 52 Micro-Memoirs. Pieces from this collection were awarded The Orlando Award in Nonfiction from A Room of Her Own, The Lamar York Prize from The Chattahoochee Review, and The Porter Fleming Award for Excellence in the Essay, as well as a third nonfiction grant from the Mississippi Arts Commission. Heating & Cooling received generous reviews in The New York Times; The Wall Street Journal; Kirkus; Publisher’s Weekly; BookList, The Rumpus, Poets & Writers; The Kenyon Review, Library Journal (starred), and others. The book was selected as an Atlanta Journal Constitution’s Best Books of 2017, a Goodreaders Favorite Book of 2017; and won the Housatonic Nonfiction Prize. I was also the first woman honored with The University of Notre Dame Alumni Association’s Award for Outstanding Accomplishments in Writing.
From 2016 to 2021, I served as the poet laureate of Mississippi. Perhaps due to the public-facing nature of that role, I began writing for a broader audience, publishing in The New York Times and The Washington Post. I’ve made appearances on The New York Times Close Up with Sam Roberts and CNN Newsroom with Pamela Brown. The TED Talk I gave on how reading literature increases empathy has been viewed by over 200,000 people. And I was invited to tell a story for The Moth Mainstage in NYC and heard my story replayed on NPR. My efforts to bring poetry into Mississippi schools were rewarded with The Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellowship, a $50,000 grant recognizing literary accomplishment and activism.
I like to present my work—I’ve given over 500 readings, including internationally in Brazil, Canada, the Czech Republic, Denmark, England, Germany, Israel, Iceland, Scotland, and Switzerland.
Currently, I’m Distinguished Professor at the University of MS, where I’ve won four teaching awards. My newest book, The Irish Goodbye: Micro-Memoirs, was published by W. W. Norton in 2026 and is an IndieNext Great Read. Work from this book has won the Shelby Foote Essay Prize and has been selected for anthologies and textbooks, including The Best of Thirty Years of Creative Nonfiction; Grabbed: Writers on Sexual Assault, Empowerment, & Healing; Malleable and True: A Hybrid Craft Anthology; and The Practice of Creative Writing.
And two of my favorite honors remain local ones: I have a dish named after me at Big Bad Breakfast (you should try it; I’m delicious). And I was crafted into an action figure, currently on display in my local indie, Square Books—though, happily, I’m Not For Sale.