Fred Chappell is the author of a dozen books of verse, two story collections, and eight novels. A native of Canton in the mountains of western North Carolina, he taught at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro for over 40 years. He is the winner of, among other awards, the Bollingen Prize in Poetry, Aiken Taylor Prize, T. S. Eliot Prize, and Roanoke-Chowan Poetry Prize seven times over. He was the Poet Laureate of North Carolina from 1997-2002.