DBF Activities | Authors | Schedule
About DBF | News | Participate | General Information

Home > Decatur Book Festival Authors > Beth Ann Fennelly

Beth Ann Fennelly

Beth Ann Fennelly

Beth Ann Fennelly is an Assistant Professor of English at Ole Miss and lives in Oxford, Mississippi, with her husband, fiction writer Tom Franklin, their daughter, Claire, and their infant son, Thomas.

Fennelly has received grants from the State of Illinois Arts Council, the Mississippi Arts Commission, and the National Endowment for the Arts. She is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize, the Wood Award for Distinguished Writing from The Carolina Quarterly, and residencies at the University of Arizona, Sewanee, MacDowell, and Breadloaf.

Her poems have been reprinted in Best American Poetry 1996, 2005, and 2006, Contemporary American Poetry, The Penguin Book of the Sonnet, and Poets of the New Century. In 2002 she read from her work at the Library of Congress, at the invitation of the U. S. Poet Laureate. Her first book, Open House, won The 2001 Kenyon Review Prize for Poetry, the GLCA New Writers Award, and was a Book Sense Top Ten Poetry Pick. Her second book, Tender Hooks, was published by W. W. Norton in April, 2004. A book of essays, Great With Child: Letters to a Young Mother, was also published by Norton in 2006.