Beth Ann Fennelly

Beth Ann Fennelly
Fennelly at Off Square Books in 2013
Born	(1971-05-22) May 22, 1971 (age 45)
Occupation	Writer, Professor
Ethnicity	American
Alma mater	M.F.A., University of Arkansas B.A., Notre Dame University
Genre	Poetry, Fiction, Nonfiction
Spouse	Tom Franklin (author)
Children	1 daughter, 2 sons

Beth Ann Fennelly (born May 22, 1971) is an American poet and prose writer and is the Poet Laureate of Mississippi.

She was born in New Jersey and raised in Lake Forest, Illinois. She attended Woodlands Academy of the Sacred Heart in Lake Forest, graduating in 1989. She earned a BA magna cum laude from the University of Notre Dame in 1993. After graduation, taught English for a year in a coal mining city on the Czech/Polish border. She later earned an MFA from the University of Arkansas, followed by the Diane Middlebrook Fellowship at the University of Wisconsin. She taught poetry at Knox College for two years. Since 2001, she's taught poetry and non-fiction at the University of Mississippi, where she directs the MFA Program. She's won several teaching awards, including Outstanding Liberal Arts Teacher of the Year (2011) and The University of Mississippi Humanities Teacher of the Year (2011).

Fennelly's first collection of poems, Open House, won multiple awards, including the Zoo Press Poetry Prize, the 2001 Kenyon Review Prize, the Great Lakes Colleges Association Award, and a Book Sense Top Ten Poetry Pick. Her poems have been included in numerous anthologies, including three editions of The Best American Poetry. She received a grant from the National Endowment of the Arts in 2002 and she has also won a Pushcart Prize. In 2009, she received a Fulbright grant to Brazil to study the poetry of Elizabeth Bishop. Her second and third books of poetry, Tender Hooks (2004) and Unmentionables (2008), were published by W. W. Norton.

Fennelly is a contributor to The Oxford American, where her essays frequently feature the topics of Southern food, music, and books. Her essays have appeared in Ploughshares, Poets & Writers, Ecotone, and The Virginia Quarterly Review. The Society of American Travel Writers awarded her the Lowell Prize for her work in Southern Living. She published a book of essays, Great With Child: Letters to a Young Mother, in 2006.