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| Biography: Fred Chappell |
Compiled by The University of North Carolina Center for Public Television and the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.
In December 1997, Governor Jim Hunt appointed Fred Chappell North Carolina's Poet Laureate. This is only the latest achievement for Mr. Chappell, who began teaching in the Department of English at UNC-Greensboro in 1964. In 1987 he received the O. Max Gardner Award, the highest teaching award bestowed by the University of North Carolina system, and in 1988 he was named the Burlington Industries Professor of English. He teaches advanced composition, poetry and fiction.
He also writes about poetry every month as a News & Observer book columnist. One of his first duties as poet laureate was to write and read a poem in August 1998 when President Clinton visited the state to designate the New River as an "American Heritage River," a preservation project.
Born in Canton, North Carolina and educated at Duke University, Mr. Chappell has written 14 books of verse, two volumes of stories, one of criticism and eight novels. Link here to a bibliography of his work.
Among the awards and honors Mr. Chappell has received over his long career are the Sir Walter Raleigh Prize (1973), the North Carolina Award for Literature (1980), Yale University Library's Bollingen Prize in poetry (1985), a literature award from the National Academy of Arts and Letters (1968), the best foreign book prize from the Academie Française (1972), and the Aiken Taylor Award in poetry (1996). His works of fiction include I Am One of You Forever and Brighten The Corner Where You Are, and a new volume of poetry, Spring Garden.
Mr. Chappell lives in Greensboro with his wife, Susan. They have one son, Heath, a jazz musician who lives in Chicago.
To read the News & Observer columns on-line:
go to http://newsobserver.com/features/arts/ and enter the keywords "Chappell and poetry" in the Search Archives box. Registration is required to access the News & Observer archives.
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