Judson Mitcham
Judson Mitcham was the poet laureate of Georgia from 2012 to 2019. In 2013, he was inducted into the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame. His poetry has been widely published in literary journals, including Poetry, Harper’s Magazine, The Georgia Review, and The Hudson Review. He received an NEA Fellowship in Creative Writing and has been a Pushcart Prize recipient. Mitcham was the first writer to be awarded the Townsend Prize for Fiction twice—for The Sweet Everlasting and Sabbath Creek. His most recent novel, What You Cannot Tell, was published in 2026 by Mercer University Press. A native of Monroe, Georgia, he received his PhD from the University of Georgia in 1974 and taught psychology at Fort Valley State University until his retirement in 2004. He has served as adjunct professor of creative writing at Mercer University, Georgia College, and Emory University, where he directed the Summer Writers’ Institute. Mitcham lives in Macon, Georgia, with his wife, Jean. They have two children and four grandchildren. Mitcham’s new book of poems is Let Your Heart Be Troubled.
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Judson Mitcham
Let Your Heart Be Troubled: Poems
LET YOUR HEART BE TROUBLED is Judson Mitcham's first collection of poems in twenty years. It takes as its epigraph Paul Valéry's description of language as "the god gone astray in the flesh." These poems engage a single life and many lives at once, moving toward what is here called soul, traveling a path laid down by a lexicon of plain words. This is a collection that should reward opening the book at random, but it is structured so that it may also be read as the scaffolding of a narrative. The history it begins with is American history; the soul at the end of its path is an American soul. The lexicon's journey is orderly, but the language does go astray: it changes tone; it offers a fluid music plus lines so thickly textured as to raise a racket; it revels in vernacular speech; it amuses itself; it plays at irony and keeps moving toward an end. The poems address family and the loss of family; faith and the loss of faith; race and human failure; the Christ-haunted South; the passing of time. Many of these poems were written during the author's tenure as poet laureate of Georgia. "Prayer" was delivered at The Funeral for 13,000, Andersonville Historic Site, September 19, 2015. "Sadness" and "Praise" served as benedictions at the Governor's Awards in the Arts and Humanities.
