Robert Morgan

Robert Morgan was born October 3, 1944 in Hendersonville, North Carolina
and grew up on a family farm in the Green River valley of the Blue Ridge
Mountains. His books of poetry include Land Diving, Trunk & Thicket,
Groundwork, At the Edge of the Orchard Country, Sigodlin, Green River:
New and Selected Poems, and Topsoil Road. He has written short stories,
essays, historical non-fiction, and several novels, including The Mountains
Won’t Remember Us, Good Measure, The Hinterlands, The Truest Pleasure,
which was listed by Publisher’s Weekly as one of the notable books of 1995,
and Gap Creek, which was awarded the Southern Book Critics Circle Award
for Fiction in 2000, and was the Appalachian Writer’s Association Book of
the Year. It was also a selection of the Oprah Book Club and a New York
Times bestseller. Morgan received NEA grants in 1974, 1981, and 1987. In
1988 he was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship, and a Rockefeller
Foundation fellowship, and in 1991 he was given the James G. Hanes Poetry
Prize by the Fellowship of Southern Writers, and the North Carolina
Literature Award. In 2007 he was presented with the Academy Award in
Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His latest books
are October Crossing (Broadstone Books, 2009), The Strange Attractor:
New and Selected Poems and Boone: A Biography. He has taught at Cornell
University since 1971, and resides in Ithaca, New York.