A. R. Ammons:

A.R. Ammons twice won a National Book Award, in 1973 for Collected Poems: 1951-1971 and in 1993 for Garbage. Among his many other honors are a Bollingen Prize, a National Book Critics Circle Award, an award from the National Institute of Arts and Letters, a MacArthur Prize Fellow Award, and the Robert Frost Medal from the Poetry Society of America.

Born to farmers near Whiteville, North Carolina in 1926, Ammons began writing poetry aboard a U.S. Navy destroyer in World War II. He graduated from Wake Forest with a degree in biology, and attended graduate school at the University of California at Berkeley. He went on to work as a real estate salesman, an editor, an elementary school principal, and an executive in a glass company before he began teaching at Cornell University in 1964, where he was Goldwin Smith Professor of Poetry until his retirement in 1998. He died on February 25, 2001 at the age of 75.

(Back to Poetry Daily Prose Feature - This Is Just a Place: The Life and Work of A. R. Ammons)