Wyatt Prunty

On May 15, 1947, Wyatt Prunty was born in Humbolt, Tennessee and raised in Athens, Georgia. He received a BA degree in 1969 from the University of the South where he studied with Allen Tate. After serving for three years in the Navy, he attended the writing seminars at Johns Hopkins and received a master's degree in 1973, followed by a PhD from Louisiana State in 1979.

He is the author of several collections of poetry, including:The Lover's Guide to Trapping (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009); Unarmed and Dangerous: New and Selected Poems (2000); Domestic of the Outer Banks (1980); The Times Between (1982); What Women Know, What Men Believe (1986); Balance as Belief (1989); The Run of the House (1993) and Since the Noon Mail Stopped (1997).

Through he does not write exclusively in form or meter, Prunty is often associated with the New Formalism movement which seeks to revive traditional forms of verse. His poems frequently examine the concerns and experiences of daily life, addressing family and work with deep clarity. In a review of Unarmed and Dangerous in the New York Times Book Review, Melaine Rehak writes: "There are vast expanses of ordinary fabric, bejeweled by moments of existential clarity . . . Prunty holds everyday experience up to the light in such a way that it seems anything but. He has an exquisite hold on life."

About his work, Donald Justice has said: "People a century hence will be able to look back through the lens of these poems and see what it was to live in our time—to live, that is, in the center of the culture and not at its edges, where the grotesque and bizarre have tended to clutter, especially in the literature of the South. No, these poems are different. They are, you might say, exaltations of the ordinary, if we may understand the ordinary as, after all, one of the great and enduring subjects. I should add that some of the poems are very funny, too."

Prunty is also the author of a critical work on contemporary poetry, "Fallen from the Symboled World": Precedents for the New Formalism (Oxford University Press, 1990), and the editor of a collection of essays, Sewanee Writers on Writing (Louisiana State University Press, 2000). His grants and honors include fellowships from the Rockefeller Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, Johns Hopkins, and the Brown Foundation.

Prunty is the founding director of the Sewanee Writers' Conference and holds the Carlton Chair in poetry at Sewanee: the University of the South. He has taught at the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars, Louisiana State University, Washington and Lee University, and Middlebury's Bread Loaf School of English and Writers' Conference. He is the general editor of the Sewanee Writers' Series and director of the Tennessee Williams Fellowship program.