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Beth Ann Fennelly was born in 1971 and grew up in a suburb north of Chicago. In 1993 she received her B.A. magna cum laude from the University of Notre Dame. The following year, Beth Ann taught English in a coal mining village on the Czech/Polish border, and returned to the States to earn the M.F.A. degree in poetry from the University of Arkansas. After graduation, she received the Diane Middlebrook Fellowship from the University of Wisconsin. She’s currently an Assistant Professor of English at Ole Miss and lives in Oxford, MS, with her husband, fiction writer Tom Franklin, their daughter, Claire, and their infant son, Thomas.
Beth Ann has received some of America's highest honors, including a $50,000 inaugural grant in 2006 from the United States Artist Fund and a 2003 National Endowment for the Arts Award. She's won grants from the State of Illinois Arts Council and the Mississippi Arts Commission, and is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize, the Wood Award for Distinguished Writing from The Carolina Quarterly, and the Black Warrior Review Poetry Contest. She's had residencies at the University of Arizona, Sewanee, MacDowell, and Breadloaf. Her poems have been published in TriQuarterly, Shenandoah, The Georgia Review, Ploughshares, The American Scholar, and Poetry Ireland Review; she was the New Voices feature of The Kenyon Review with a critical introduction by Robert Hass. Beth's poems have been reprinted in Best American Poetry 1996, 2005, and 2006, Contemporary American Poetry, The Penguin Book of the Sonnet, and Poets of the New Century. In 2002 she read from her work at the Library of Congress at the invitation of the U. S. Poet Laureate. Her poems have been translated into Spanish and Polish. Her first full length book, Open House, won The 2001 Kenyon Review Prize for Poetry, the GLCA New Writers Award, and was a Book Sense Top Ten Poetry Pick. Her second book, Tender Hooks, was published by W. W. Norton in April, 2004. A book of essays, Great With Child, was published by Norton in 2006. Her third book of poetry, Unmentionables, is forthcoming from W. W. Norton in April 2008.
Praise for Open House
“Beth Ann Fennelly is an ambitious and spacious young talent. The poems range widely in form and subject matter. . .there is a striking accuracy of language and notable skill that sets them apart, displaying a promising, authentic voice.”
—Paul Zimmer in The Georgia Review
“With its high spirits, its love of textures of different kinds of writing, its search for ways to frame ambitious energies . . .the poem advances with a determination to keep the author interested and alive to her materials; in places, amused with itself and hopscotching, in places veering into unexpected depths, it is an immensely lively performance.”
—Robert Hass in his critical introduction to The Kenyon Review’s New Voices feature.
“Beth Ann Fennelly’s poems are consistently dramatic, complex in their perceptions and formal unfolding, and enthralled with language. . .This is one of the most interesting, challenging, and accomplished first books to appear in recent years. . .Genuinely outstanding.”
--The Harvard Review
“Beth Ann Fennelly’s Open House marks an auspicious debut for a poet not yet thirty years of age. In poems ranging from blank verse variations on the traditional sonnet to a sustained mediation in the highly elliptical and haunting polyphonous postmodernist mode, Fennelly tempers cognitive power and sensual wordplay with a subversive wit born of wry self-knowledge.”
--Floyd Collins, Westbranch
“Fennelly approaches language with playfulness and reverence, heady with possibilities, wary of dilution. She takes on personas such as Milton’s daughter or a survivor of the siege of Paris in dramatic narratives that one could forget are verse. Nearly half the book is a journal of the poetic mind in process, guarded by the internal critic, Mr. Daylater. For all that, Open House is surprisingly readable, ending with a handful of graceful love poems.”
--Tim Rauschenberger, The Christian Science Monitor
“These poems can be elegiac, passionate, meditative, tender, angry, and funny by turns. Beth Ann Fennelly is clearly a poet to watch.”
--The Notre Dame Review
Praise for Tender Hooks
“Move over, Sharon Olds, and make way, Denise Duhamel! Fennelly is a southern poet who writes of her own female experience as carnally, or perhaps incarnally, as either of those northerners . . .This is awesome, humanely humbling poetry.”
--BookList, starred review
“Fennelly’s second book follows close upon her first, Open House, a well-received winner of the 2001 Kenyon Review Prize. In this equally engaging new collection, Fennelly is caught up with the birth of a daughter and maps her obsession. . . .Fennelly counters academic pretension with American spunk. A smart and vivacious book.
--Library Journal
“There are so many reasons for everyone, male or female, to read this collection. Fennelly is the sort of poet who reminds her readers why verse is so important to daily life. She cracks open pretension, and her in work, which is both accessible and high-minded, she suggests that poetry is, in fact, vital to our very existence.”
--The Capitol Times, Madison Wisconsin
“There’s nothing easy or casual in Tender Hooks. As mommies everywhere know, motherhood is not for sissies. Fennelly sees her family as “a large target,” “a glass-smooth pond / just begging for a stone.” These poems are as sweet and loving as the title suggests, yet the face of Sylvia Plath peers out of more than one.”
--David Kirby in The Atlanta Journal Constitution
"Yes, Tender Hooks is mostly about motherhood, but Fennelly's vision has more in common with Tarantino's than Martha Stewart's. One long, rich poem placed at the center of the collection, 'Telling the Gospel Truth,' puts the blood and sweat back into the nativity, before moving on, cleverly and without contrivance, to contemplate the fatuity of poems that use 'dinner knives to check for spinach in their teeth." Fennelly's poems aren't mannered, needless to say. They're plain, funny, and raw, and if you want to buy a present that isn't cute or dreamy for a new mother then Tender Hooks will hit the spot--and won't stop hitting it even though it's sore."
--Nick Hornby, The Believer
"Fennelly is officially one of my top ten poets."
--Sheman Alexie, ShermanAlexie.com
Praise for Great with Child
"Superb."
--Good Housekeeping
"A reflective, transformative book"
--Book List
"I read Great with Child at one sitting, crying and laughing throughout. Beth Ann Fennelly has written an instant classic, filled with humor and wisdom, a necessary and beautiful book which will be cherished not only by an endless line of mothers-to-be, but by every woman who wants to remember what it was really like to become a new mother."
--Lee Smith
"The writing is at once rhythmic, exuberant, and passionate. To enjoy Great with Child, one most definitely does not have to be an expectant mother, just someone who revels in richly told stories."
--The Mobile Press-Register, Mobile, AL
"Give this book to anyone who is "great with child"; she will be eternally grateful. Fennelly's missives are alternately moving, funny, and practical, with an unusual honesty about just how hard it is to be a young mother.
--The St. Petersburg Times
"By turns poetic and funny, dreamy and direct, "Great with Child" might be the best book ever to give for a baby shower."
--The Tampa Tribune
"The themes will strike a cord with any mother or mother-to-be. This elegiac tome captures motherhood with candid finesse."
--Child
"This book sang its heart out to me, and I clapped my hands in time."
--The Capitol Times, Madison WI