Robert Morgan (b. 1944) is one of the most distinguished writers in southern and Appalachian literature, celebrated for his novels, poetry, short fiction, and historical and biographical writing, totaling more than thirty volumes. Morgan's work gives voice to the traditionally underrepresented people of southern Appalachia, and his appearances in such popular venues as The Oprah Winfrey Show, National Public Radio's Morning Edition, and the New York Times Bestseller List have contributed to his wide readership and successful dismantling of Hollywood stereotypes that still dog the region in the nation's larger consciousness. His writing makes a case for the dignity of work, the beauty and terror of the landscape, and the essential value of creating a community and learning to live in the world. The interviews in Conversations with Robert Morgan provide readers and scholars the first stand-alone book on Morgan's long and fascinating career as a master of multiple genres, and make a significant contribution to the understanding of American, southern, and Appalachian literature and culture. Collected here are five decades of interviews that cover such topics as literary influence, the impact of war on family and community, poetic and narrative craft, the role of environmentalism in American literature, and the journey from impoverished North Carolina mountain boy to award-winning Ivy League professor. Morgan is Kappa Alpha Professor of English at Cornell University, where he has taught since 1971. Readers will learn about writing across multiple genres, craft that can be learned and practiced by a writer, and studying the past for those present truths that create what Morgan values most in literature, "a community across time.

Robert Morgan (b. 1944) is one of the most distinguished writers in southern and Appalachian literature, celebrated for his novels, poetry, short fiction, and historical and biographical writing, totaling more than thirty volumes. Morgan's work gives voice to the traditionally underrepresented people of southern Appalachia, and his appearances in such popular venues as The Oprah Winfrey Show, National Public Radio's Morning Edition, and the New York Times Bestseller List have contributed to his wide readership and successful dismantling of Hollywood stereotypes that still dog the region in the nation's larger consciousness. His writing makes a case for the dignity of work, the beauty and terror of the landscape, and the essential value of creating a community and learning to live in the world. The interviews in Conversations with Robert Morgan provide readers and scholars the first stand-alone book on Morgan's long and fascinating career as a master of multiple genres, and make a significant contribution to the understanding of American, southern, and Appalachian literature and culture. Collected here are five decades of interviews that cover such topics as literary influence, the impact of war on family and community, poetic and narrative craft, the role of environmentalism in American literature, and the journey from impoverished North Carolina mountain boy to award-winning Ivy League professor. Morgan is Kappa Alpha Professor of English at Cornell University, where he has taught since 1971. Readers will learn about writing across multiple genres, craft that can be learned and practiced by a writer, and studying the past for those present truths that create what Morgan values most in literature, "a community across time.

For more than fifty years Robert Morgan has brought to life the landscape, history and culture of the Southern Appalachia of his youth. In 30 acclaimed volumes, including poetry, short story collections, novels and nonfiction prose, he has celebrated an often marginalized region. His many honors include four NEA Fellowships, a Guggenheim Fellowship and an award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, as well as television appearances (The Best American Poetry: New Stories from the South, Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards). This first book on Morgan collects appreciations and analyses by some of his most dedicated readers, including fellow poets, authors, critics and scholars. An unpublished interview with him is included, along with an essay by him on the importance of sense of place, and a bibliography of publications by and about him.

Home to extraordinary writers such as William Styron, Tom Wolfe, and Ellen Glasgow, the state of Virginia’s literary past is among the most prolific in the nation. Indeed, this state, with its beautiful and varied ecosystems—Appalachia, Chesapeake Bay, the Shenandoah Valley, and Virginia’s beautiful beaches, just to name a few—seem to serve as the landscapes from which equally varied and nutritive writers spring, from the lyrical, often ecstatic meditations of Charles Wright to the poignant, dynamic narratives and lyrics of Ellen Bryant Voigt, from the moving narratives of Rita Dove to the formal mastery and wit of R. T. Smith. Series Editor William Wright, along with Volume Editors J. Bruce Fuller, Jesse Graves, and Amy Wright, have collaborated to bring readers a wide-ranging survey in The Southern Poetry Anthology, Volume IX: Virginia. This volume seeks to emphasize the uniqueness of the poetic voices of Virginia. In doing so, the editors have acknowledged and included many celebrated writers from the recent past as well as relatively new, diverse voices that reiterate the literary fecundity of one of the most beautiful, revered, and complicated states in the American South.

The essays collected in Said-Songs range from the personal to the scholarly and explore the hybrid territory in between, where a creative writer considers literary craft and how it influences the generative imagination. Jesse Graves examines the writings of the people and about the places that have most shaped his own poetry, including several studies on his ""hometown literary hero,"" the Knoxville-born winner of the Pulitzer Prize, James Agee. In the volume's opening essay, Lyric: A Personal History, readers encounter an emerging poet deeply immersed in the history of lyric and narrative poems and gain a view into how these literary traditions shape the writing and revising of his first poetry collection, the award-winning Tennessee Landscape with Blighted Pine. Appalachia and its writers hold the central focus of this collection, but Graves cultivates a space in which poets with voices and styles as diverse as John Ashbery, Federico Garcia Lorca, and Adam Zagajewski receive fresh critical attention. These represent the writers, or the connections between writers, that Graves could not stop thinking about and felt compelled to try to understand through the steady concentration of analysis. Every writer's journey is also the journey of a reader and Graves invites us to join his ongoing exploration of books, music, and the literary imagination. The essays and interviews gathered in Said-Songs trace the evolution of a poet's sensibility from the early days of a rural eastern Tennessee childhood to the maturing voice of the writer.

Merciful Days is the fourth collection of poems by East Tennessee poet Jesse Graves, recipient of the James Still Award for Writing about the Appalachia from the Fellowship of Southern Writers. In a language that is both plainspoken and lyrical, Graves examines the connections that hold people together across generations and against the breaches of time and distance. The landscapes of his native region possess a mythic beauty and Graves writes of the animating force it can become in a poet's imagination. He closely observes animals and plants, the circling of hawks, and the curling of wild ginger leaves, as well as less palpable phenomena such as how wind stirs the surface of still water. Merciful Days is a book of elegies and celebrations. Graves's poems are haunted by the lost futures of lives cut short, and by speculative narrations of omens and portents, witches and spirits seen only in reflection. For all the darkness visible in the world, Graves elevates the great joy of feeding birds, walking in the woods, and sharing a life, sometimes only in memory, with the people we love. Those who have passed on are remembered here and their stories become a source of light. The new work in Merciful Days will remind readers why Ron Rash has said, ""These poems have the music, wisdom, and singular voice of a talent fully realized, and make abundantly clear that Jesse Graves is one of America's finest young poets.

Specter Mountain is a book-length poetry collaboration between Jesse Graves and William Wright that imagines the spiritual and ecological life of an embattled landscape. The collection fuses two striking poetic visions into a cohesive and innovative new perspective on nature and the inevitable imprint of human interaction with wilderness. Readers will gain a sense of the permanent beauty of rivers and mountains, timeless images of the sublime, and the grandeur that reaches beyond human life and influence. Specter Mountain is a book of voices, delivered by an impressive range of speakers, including even the mountain itself. Sometimes they speak in chorus and sometimes in isolation, out of the past and from the future, offering meditations and reflections on our changing world. These poems reveal a sensitivity to the passing of time, and to the many losses that people and places suffer and outlast together. If the mountain is a haunted landscape, it is also a place of aspiration, where traditions flourish and customs give meaning to the lives that pass there. In his preface to the book, celebrated poet and novelist Robert Morgan says, ""Jesse Graves and William Wright are two of the most exciting talents in contemporary poetry. Before they have spoken in distinct and memorable individual voices. In Specter Mountain they have pooled their considerable gifts and found a synergy that yields a unique work that will serve as a landmark for our time, and for many years to come.

Robert Morgan and Kathryn Stripling Byer, Al Maginnes and Cathy Smith Bowers, Thomas Raine Crowe and Michael McFee, as well as many new voices. . . Indeed, the variegation of the Tar Heel State's landscapes, as well as its rich history, is reflected through the myriad voices of its contemporary verse. As with other volumes of "The Southern Poetry Anthology," this book--full of a wide gamut of poetic styles and approaches--will appeal to many readers, prove an excellent teaching resource for North Carolina students of literature, and serve as the definitive poetic document for North Carolina for many years.
Conceived by Series Editor William Wright in 2003, "The Southern Poetry Anthology" is a projected twelve-to-sixteen volume project celebrating established and emerging poets of the American South, published by Texas Review Press. Inspired by single-volume anthologies such as Leon Stokesbury's "The Made Thing," Gil Allen's "A Ninety-Six Sampler," and Guy Owen and Mary C. Williams' "Contemporary Southern Poetry: an Anthology," "The Southern Poetry Anthology" aspires to provide readers with a documentary-like survey of the best poetry being written in the American South at the present moment.
Specifically, the editors' goals are twofold: first, to re-establish poetry of the South as a major presence in American literature, and second, to include a greater range of poets from the South to introduce a new poetic geography, a fresh corpus of what we understand to be "Southern Poetry."

Every place has its own poetry. For some places, the poetry appears in the tones of voice between neighbors in the grocery store, or in the spirit people share when a high school football team brings them out of their houses on Friday evenings, or even through the sounds engines make as they idle in traffic on the road out of the city after a workday. The poetry of Appalachia sings in all those familiar ways, but also in the music of the particular poems collected in The Southern Poetry Anthology, Volume III: Southern Appalachia. This anthology of contemporary poetry arrives from one of America's most vibrant literary communities, an area with a rich storytelling history and beautiful natural landscape, the often misunderstood Appalachian South. Readers familiar with writing from Appalachia will be pleased to see work from such favorites as Charles Wright, Robert Morgan, and Fred Chappell, yet will be intrigued by the already distinctive voices of emerging talents like Melissa Range and D. Antwan Stewart. This collection of poems is the only one of its kind, a snapshot album of a timeless place, as it is represented at the present moment. "For reasons that are not entirely clear, there has been an explosion of poetry in the Southern Appalachian region in recent years. Perhaps this creative surge has been inspired by the rapid changes in the region, as the vast hunting ranges of the Cherokees are crossed by superhighways, and golf courses, casinos, condominiums, and shopping malls spread into the shadows of the highest peaks. Or perhaps the poetry is a celebration of a region still discovering itself, its heritage and resources. What is clear is that much of the best poetry of our time is being written in or about the Southern mountains, with unprecedented diversity, artistry, freshness, and humanity. Here is a poetry of place and people, of history, sometimes sad, often comic, a poetry of haunting voices, vision, music and story. This anthology is a showcase of some of the best poetry we have, from the place the music comes from."--Robert Morgan