Poet Bios 2011-2012
Stephen Dobyns has published thirteen books of poems, twenty novels, two books of essays on poetry and a book of short stories (Eating Naked, Holt/Metropolitan, 2000). His most recent book is a book of essays Next Word, Better Word published by Palgrave, in April 2011. Copper Canyon published his most recent book of poems, Winter's Journey, in May 2010. His most recent novels are Boy in the Water (Holt/Metropolitan, 1999) and The Church of Dead Girls (Holt/ Metropolitan, 1997). Ten of his novels form a series of mysteries set in Saratoga Springs, NY. His first book of poems, Concurring Beasts, was the Lamont Poetry Selection for 1972 of the Academy of American Poets. His fifth book, Black Dog, Red Dog, was a winner in the National Poetry Series. His sixth book, Cemetery Nights, received the Poetry Society of America's Melville Cane Award in 1987.
Dobyns has received a Guggenheim and three fellowships from the National Endowment of the Arts, as well as numerous awards for individual poems including Pushcart prizes and prizes from Poetry and the American Poetry Review. Poems have been selected by Best American Poems and about forty have appeared in various anthologies. Two of his novels, Cold Dog Soup and The Two Deaths of Senora Puccini have been made into films and another novels is currently under option. His novels have been translated into more than twenty languages. Two of his short stories have been selected for Best American Short Stories, in 1995 and 2000, and two others were published in the Pushcart Anthology. Eating Naked was also selected as the best book of short stories of the year by the Southern Review.
Dobyns has written more than fifty book reviews for such newspapers as the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune and the Boston Globe. He has published more than thirty essays and introductions in various books and anthologies, most recently "The Titicut Follies as Comedy" in Writers at the Movies (HarperCollins, 2000). He has taught at more than a dozen colleges and universities including the University of New Hampshire, Boston University, the University of Iowa and in the MFA Program at Warren Wilson College, Syracuse University, Emerson College and Sarah Lawrence. He was a general assignment reporter for the Detroit News and has been a contributing writer for the San Diego Reader from 1995 to 2009, having written over thirty cover articles in the Reader.
Cynthia Cruz 's poems have been published in the New Yorker, Paris Review, Boston Review, American Poetry Review, Kenyon Review and others. Her first collection of poems, RUIN, was published by Alice James Book. Her second collection, The Glimmering Room, is forthcoming from Four Way Books. She teaches at Sarah Lawrence College and was the Hodder Fellow in Poetry at Princeton for the year 2010-2011.
Carl Dennis is the author of eleven books of poetry, including, most recently, Callings (Penguin, 2010). A recipient of the Pulitzer Prize and the Ruth Lilly Prize, he lives in Buffalo, New York.
Theresa Davis is one of Atlanta's best known performance poets, giving voice to the things that you've been thinking but never could articulate. Theresa has forged an impressive career as a solo performer, winning poetry slams and featuring at spoken word venues around Atlanta and the nation, as well as leading writing and performance workshops and headlining conferences across the southeast. She is a member of The Word Diversity Collective/Art Amok and represented Atlanta as a member of the 2006 - 2011 Art Amok Slam Team. In March of 2011 Theresa was ranked #1 female slam poet in the world as the winner of the Women of the World Poetry Slam.
Chris Forhan , born and raised in Seattle, Washington, is the author of three books of poetry: Black Leapt In, winner of the Barrow Street Press Poetry Prize; The Actual Moon, The Actual Stars, winner of the Morse Poetry Prize and a Washington State Book Award; and Forgive Us Our Happiness, winner of the Bakeless Prize. He is also the author of two chapbooks, x and Crumbs of Bread, and his poems have appeared in Poetry, Paris Review, Ploughshares, New England Review, Parnassus, and other magazines, as well as in The Best American Poetry. He has won a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and two Pushcart Prizes and has been a resident at Yaddo and a fellow at Bread Loaf. He lives with his wife, the poet Alessandra Lynch, and their two sons, Milo and Oliver, in Indianapolis, where he teaches at Butler University.
David Wojahn was born in St. Paul, Minnesota, in 1953, and educated at the University of Minnesota and the University of Arizona. His first collection, Icehouse Lights, was chosen by Richard Hugo as a winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets prize, and published in 1982. The collection was also the winner of the Poetry Society of America's William Carlos Williams Book Award. His second collection, Glassworks, was published by the University of Pittsburgh Press in 1987, and was awarded the Society of Midland Authors' Award for best volume of poetry to be published during that year. Pittsburgh is also the publisher of four of his subsequent books, Mystery Train (1990), Late Empire (1994), The Falling Hour (1997) and Spirit Cabinet (2002). His most recent collection, Interrogation Palace: New and Selected Poems 1982-2004, was published by Pittsburgh in 2006, and was one of three finalists for the Pulitzer Prize and winner of the O. B. Hardison Award from the Folger Shakespeare Library. He is also the author of a collection of essays on contemporary poetry, Strange Good Fortune (University of Arkansas Press, 2001), and editor (with Jack Myers) of A Profile of 20th Century American Poetry (Southern Illinois University Press, 1991), and two posthumous collections of Lynda Hull's poetry, The Only World (HarperCollins, 1995) and Collected Poems (Graywolf, 2006). He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the Illinois and Indiana Councils for the Arts, and in 1987-88 was the Amy Lowell Traveling Poetry Scholar. He has taught at a number of institutions, among them Indiana University, the University of Chicago, the University of Houston, the University of Alabama, and the University of New Orleans. He is presently Professor of English at Virginia Commonwealth University, and is also a member of the program faculty of the MFA in Writing Program of Vermont College of the Fine Arts. His newest collection, World Tree, was published by Pittsburgh in the winter of 2011.
Alice Friman's fifth book of poetry is Vinculum from LSU. Previous books are The Book of the Rotten Daughter and Inverted Fire, BkMk, and Zoo, Arkansas. She has received fellowships from the Indiana Arts Commission, the Arts Council of Indianapolis, MacDowell, Yaddo, and the Bernheim Foundation. Among her prizes are the 2001 James Boatwright Prize from Shenandoah plus three prizes from the Poetry Society of America. Poems appear in The Best American Poetry 2009, Poetry, The Georgia Review, The Southern Review, and many others. Anthologized widely and published in thirteen countries, she was Professor of English and creative writing at the University of Indianapolis from 1973 to 1993 and is now Poet-in-Residence at Georgia College & State University. Her new poetry podcast series is Ask Alice.
David Bottoms's first book, Shooting Rats at the Bibb County Dump, was chosen by Robert Penn Warren as winner of the 1979 Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets. His poems have appeared widely in magazines such as The Atlantic, The New Yorker, Harper's, Poetry, and The Paris Review, as well as five dozen anthologies and textbooks. He is the author of six other books of poetry, two novels, and a book of essays and interviews. A new book of poems, We Almost Disappear, is scheduled for publication in the fall of 2011. Among his other awards are both the Frederick Bock Prize and the Levinson Prize from Poetry magazine, an Ingram Merrill Award, an Award in Literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. He has served as the Richard Hugo Poet-in-Residence at the University of Montana, the Ferrol Sams Distinguished Writer at Mercer University, and the Chaffee Visiting Poet-in-Residence at Johns Hopkins University. He lives with his wife and daughter in Atlanta, where he holds the Amos Distinguished Chair in English Letters at Georgia State University. He is Poet Laureate of Georgia.
Born in Ghana in 1962, Kwame Dawes spent most of his childhood and early adult life in Jamaica. Dawes has published fifteen collections of poetry. His most recent titles include Back of Mount Peace (2009); Hope's Hospice (2009); Wisteria, finalist for the Patterson Memorial Prize; Impossible Flying (2007); and Gomer's Song (2007). Progeny of Air (Peepal Tree, 1994) was the winner of the Forward Poetry Prize for Best First Collection in the UK. Other poetry collections include Resisting the Anomie (Goose Lane, 1995); Prophets (Peepal Tree, 1995); Jacko Jacobus, (Peepal Tree, 1996); and Requiem, (Peepal Tree. 1996), a suite of poems inspired by the illustrations of African American artist, Tom Feelings in his landmark book The Middle Passage: White Ships/Black Cargo; and Shook Foil (Peepal Tree, 1998), a collection of reggae-inspired poems. His book, Midland, was awarded the Hollis Summers Poetry Prize by the Ohio University Press (2001). In 2001, Dawes was a winner of a Pushcart Prize for the best American poetry of 2001 for his long poem, "Inheritance."
He has also published two novels: Bivouac (2009) and She's Gone (2007, Akashic Books), winner of the 2008 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Best First Novel. In 2007 he released A Far Cry From Plymouth Rock: A Personal Narrative (Peepal Tree Books). His essays have appeared in numerous journals including Bomb Magazine, The London Review of Books, Granta, Essence, World Literature Today, and Double Take Magazine.
In September 2009, Dawes won an Emmy for LiveHopeLove.com, an interactive site based on Kwame Dawes's Pulitzer Center project, HOPE: Living and loving with AIDS in Jamaica. It has won other accolades including a People's Voice Webby Award, and was the inspiration for the music/spoken word performance Wisteria & HOPE which premiered at the National Black Theatre Festival in North Carolina.
Poet Bios 2000-2010
David Baker is the author of nine books of poems: Never-Ending Birds, (forthcoming 2009, W. W. Norton), Treatise on Touch: Selected Poems (2007, Arc Publications, UK), Midwest Eclogue (2005), Changeable Thunder (2001), The Truth about Small Towns (1998), After the Reunion (1994), Sweet Home, Saturday Night (1991), Haunts (1985), and Laws of the Land (1981). A volume of his selected poems is being published in 2009 in Romania, in translation by C. Tanasescu, entitled Omul Alchimic (Alchemical Man). Baker?s three books of criticism are Radiant Lyre: Essays on Lyric Poetry (2007), Heresy and the Ideal: On Contemporary Poetry (2000) and Meter in English: A Critical Engagement (1996).
Among his awards are fellowships and prizes from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, Ohio Arts Council, Poetry Society of America, Society of Midland Authors, and the Pushcart Foundation. His poems and essays appear in such magazines as The Atlantic Monthly, The Nation, The New Republic, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Poetry, The Yale Review, and many others. Baker was raised in Missouri and currently resides in Granville, Ohio, where he serves as poetry editor of The Kenyon Review. He teaches at Denison University and in the M.F.A. program for writers at Warren Wilson College..
Billy Collins
Rosemary Danieltwo collections of poetry are A Sexual Tour of the Deep South (Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1975; Push Button Publishing, 1994) and Fort Bragg & Other Points South (Henry Holt & Company, 1987), and a chapbook, The Feathered Trees, was edited and published by David Bottoms (Sweetwater Press, 1976). Her recently completed collections are The Murderous Sky and The Perfect Husband. Her poems have appeared in such literary magazines as The Copenhagen Review, The New York Quarterly, The Chattahoochee Review, Arts & Letters, Tri-Quarterly, The Virginia Quarterly Review, The Atlantic Monthly, and many others. Among her awards are the William Faulkner-William Wisdom award in 2009 for her poem, "Sacred Things," two N.E.A. Fellowships in creative writing, one in poetry, another in fiction, and the first Palimpsest Prize for a most-requested out-of-print book. She is also the author of six books of fiction and nonfiction, including her revolutionary memoirs, Fatal Flowers: On Sin, Sex and Suicide in the Deep South (Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1980; Henry Holt & Company, 1989; Hill Street Press, 1999) and Sleeping with Soldiers (Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1984). Early in her career, she served as program director for Georgia's Poetry in the Schools program, a joint program of the National Endowment for the Arts and The Georgia Council for the Arts and Humanities; as part of that program, she worked for a dozen years in Poetry in the Schools programs in Georgia, South Carolina, and Wyoming, and instigated and led poetry workshops in women's prisons in Georgia and Wyoming, She is profiled in the book Feminists Who Changed America, 1963-1975, and in 2008, she received a Governor's Award in the Humanities for her impact on the state of Georgia. She is also the founder and leader of Zona Rosa, the series of writing-and-living workshops she leads throughout the country and in Europe; since its inception in 1981, over 80 Zona Rosans have become published authors.
Robert Fanning is the author of American Prophet (Marick Press, 2009), The Seed Thieves (Marick Press, 2006) and Old Bright Wheel (Ledge Press Poetry Award 2003). His poems have appeared in numerous journals, including Poetry, Ploughshares, Shenandoah, The Atlanta Review, The Hawaii Review, and other journals.
A professor of Creative Writing at Central Michigan University, Fanning's writing awards include a Creative Artist Grant from ArtServe Michigan, the Inkwell Poetry Award, and the Foley Poetry Award.
Gregory Fraser is the author of two poetry collections, Strange Piet (Texas Tech, 2003) and Answering the Ruins (Northwestern, 2009). He is also the co-author, with Chad Davidson, of the workshop textbook Writing Poetry: Creative and Critical Approaches (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2008) and the composition textbook Analyze Anything: A Guide to Critical Reading and Writing (Continuum, forthcoming in 2011). His poetry has appeared in literary journals including the Paris Review, the Southern Review, and Ploughshares. The recipient of grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, Fraser serves as associate professor of English and creative writing at the University of West Georgia.
Kodac Harrison earned his BS from Ga. Tech and a MBA from Tulane. He has released 15 recordings on three different independent record labels. He was named ?Best Local Poet? in 2008, and ?Best Spoken Word Artist? in 2002, 2003, and 2004, by Atlanta's Creative Loafing. He has co-edited three poetry anthologies. Kodac is chairman of Poetry Atlanta, and hosts the award winning Java Monkey Speaks in Decatur, Georgia.
Mark Halliday
Barbara Hamby's fourth book of poems is All-Night Lingo Tango (Pittsburgh, 2009). Her third book of poems, Babel, was chosen by Stephen Dunn to win the 2003 Associated Writing Programs Donald Hall Prize for Poetry and was also published by Pittsburgh.
Her first book, Delirium, won the 1994 Vassar Miller Prize and two prizes for the best first book of poems published in 1995, the Kate Tufts Discovery Award and the Poetry Society of America's Norma Farber First Book Award. Her second book of poems, The Alphabet of Desire, won the 1998 New York University Prize for Poetry and was published by NYU Press in May 1999. The New York Public Library chose The Alphabet of Desire as one of the 25 best books of 1999.
She received a fellowship in Poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1996. She has also received three fellowships from the Florida Arts Council. Her work has appeared in American Poetry Review, The Paris Review, The Southern Review, The Iowa Review, The Kenyon Review, The Yale Review, Ploughshares, Five Points, The Harvard Review, TriQuarterly, Best American Poetry 2000 and 2009, and the Pushcart Prize Anthology 2001.
She is married to David Kirby, and they teach in the Creative Writing Program at Florida State University in Tallahassee, Florida..
Robert Perry Ivey is from Macon, Georgia and has recently moved back from Tarrytown, New York where he completed his MFA in Creative Writing from Sarah Lawrence College. Perry feels honored to be reading in the Poetry @ Tech reading series where he attended his first large poetry reading hosted by Tom Lux and Rita Dove, Lucille Clifton, Stephen Dobyns, and Billy Collins nine years ago. Perry?s poems can be found in Lumina, The GSU Review, At-Large Magazine, and The Live Oak Review.
Allison Joseph is the author of five full-length collections of poetry, What Keeps Us Here (Ampersand, 1992), Soul Train (Carnegie Mellon, 1997), In Every Seam (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1997), Imitation of Life (Carnegie Mellon, 2003) and Worldly Pleasures (Word Press, 2004). What Keeps Us Here was the winner of Ampersand Press' 1992 Women Poets Series Competition. It also received the John C. Zacharis First Book Award from Ploughshares and Emerson College in Boston.
In addition, she was awarded Illinois Arts Council Fellowships in Poetry in 1996 and 2007 and a Literary Award from the Illinois Arts Council in 1997. Currently she is an Associate Professor at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, where she serves as editor for Crab Orchard Review and director of the Young Writers Workshop, a summer conference for high school-aged writers. Her sixth collection, My Father's Kites, will be published in 2010 by Steel Toe Books.
Thomas Lux was born in Massachusetts in December 1946. He has been awarded grants and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Mellon foundations, and the NEA. In 1994, he was awarded the Kinglsey Tufts prize for his book Split Horizon. The most recent of his 11 full-length collections is God Particles (Houghton Mifflin, 2008). Currently, he is Bourne Professor of Poetry and director of the McEver Visiting Writers program at the Georgia Institute of Technology as well as on the MFA faculties of Sarah Lawrence College and Warren Wilson College.
Ginger Murchison assisted Thomas Lux in the founding of POETRY at TECH. Her chapbook Out Here was published by Jeanne Duval Editions in 2008. Twice nominated for a Pushcart Prize, she has published articles, book reviews, and interviews, and her poems have appeared in recent publications of Horticulture, Atlanta Review, The Chattahoochee Review, Terminus Magazine and several anthologies, including Volumes II and III of Java Monkey Speaks: A Poetry Anthology. Editor of the acclaimed Cortland Review, she lives with her husband Clyde Mynatt in Atlanta.
Kevin Pilkington is a member of the writing faculty at Sarah Lawrence College and teaches a workshop in the graduate department at Manhattanville College. He is the author of six collections: his collection Spare Change was the La Jolla Poets Press National Book Award winner and his chapbook won the Ledge Poetry Prize. His collection entitled Ready to Eat the Sky was published by River City Publishing as part of their new poetry series and was a finalist for an Independent Publishers Books Award. His poetry has appeared in many anthologies including Birthday Poems: A Celebration, Western Wind, and Contemporary Poetry of New England. Over the years, he has been nominated for four Pushcarts and has appeared in Verse Daily. His poems and reviews have appeared in numerous magazines including: Poetry, Ploughshares, Iowa Review, Boston Review, Yankee, Hayden?s Ferry, Columbia, Greensboro Review, North American Review, Gulf Coast, Valparaiso Review.
Khadijah Queen was born near Detroit and raised in Southern California. A Cave Canem Fellow and three-time Pushcart Prize nominee, she holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Antioch University Los Angeles. Her debut poetry collection, Conduit, was published in 2008 under the Black Goat imprint at Akashic Books. Individual poems appear in numerous journals and anthologies including PMS: Poemmemoirstory, The Drunken Boat, /nor and Powder: Writing by Women in the Ranks from Vietnam to Iraq (Kore Press 2008). A chapbook, No Isla Encanta (2007), is available from dancing girl press. Khadijah has performed and exhibited internationally and curates an annual multi-genre reading series, Courting Risk, at Macaulay Honors College in New York City.
Currently, she is completing a second book of poetry and collaborating on a libretto incorporating video, music, dance and performance art. She is a graduate fellow in art studio with a focus on performance and installation at University of South Florida.
Chelsea Rathburn's first full-length collection of poetry, The Shifting Line, received the 2005 Richard Wilbur Award and was published by the University of Evansville Press. Her poems have appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, The Hudson Review, the Cincinnati Review, and Barrow Street, among other journals and anthologies. She is also author of a poetry chapbook, Unused Lines, published by Aralia Press in 2003. A native of Miami, Florida, she holds an MFA from the University of Arkansasand lives in Decatur
Bruce Weigl enlisted in the United States Army shortly after his 18th birthday and spent three years in the service. He served in the Vietnam War from December 1967 to December 1968 and received the Bronze Star .
Weigl's first full-length collection of poems, A Romance, was published in 1979. During the 1980s, Weigl published two more poetry collections, The Monkey Wars and Song of Napalm. In 1999, he published two more poetry collections, Archeology of the Circle: New and Selected Poems and After the Others. He also published a memoir that year titled The Circle of Hanh: A Memoir. His most recent book is Declension in the Village of Chung Loung.
Many of Weigl's poems are inspired by the time he spent in the U.S. Army and Vietnam. In The Circle of Hanh, Weigl writes, "The war took away my life and gave me poetry in return...the fate the world has given me is to struggle to write powerfully enough to draw others into the horror." In addition to writing his own poetry, Weigl worked with Thanh T. Nguyen of the Joiner Research Center to translate poems of North Vietnamese and Viet Cong soldiers captured during war. Weigl and Nguten accepted an invitation from the Vietnamese Writers Association and traveled to Hanoi to receive assistance in translating the poems.
Weigl received a prize from the American Academy of Poets in 1979. He received two Pushcart Prizes, a Patterson Poetry Prize, and a Yaddo Foundation Fellowship. Weigl was awarded the Bread Loaf Fellowship in Poetry in 1981 and was awarded a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1988 for Arts and Creative Writing. He was also nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in 1988 for Song of Napalm, and in 2006 he was awarded the Lannan Literaruy Prize in Poetry. His poems are featured in American Alphabets: 25 Contemporary Poets (2006) and many other anthologies. Weigl additionally served as the president of the Associated Writing Programs. Weigl is a distinguished professor at Lorain County Community College.
Jillian Weisse is the author of The Amputee's Guide to Sex and The Colony. Her work has appeared in A Public Space, The New York Times, and Tin House. Her poem "Incision" was animated and produced by PBS and the Poetry Foundation for Poetry Everywhere. Weise received fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center and the Fulbright Program before joining the faculty at Clemson University.
Marjory Wentworth's poems have appeared in numerous books and magazines, and she has been nominated for The Pushcart Prize four times. Her books of poetry include Noticing Eden, Despite Gravity, The Endless Repetition of an Ordinary Miracle, and What the Water Gives Me, collaboration with artist Mary Edna Fraser. Her children's story, Shackles, recently won a Silver Moonbeam Award and a 2010 SIBA Book Award nomination. Marjory teaches creative writing at the following institutions: The Art Institute of Charleston, Roper St. Francis Cancer Center "Expressions of Healing" program and LILA's Poets-in-the schools program at Burke High School in Charleston, SC.
She serves on the Board of Directors for the Lowcountry Initiative for the Literary Arts (LILA), The Poetry Society of SC, the University of SC Poetry Initiative, and the Yo Art Project. Her work is included in the South Carolina Poetry Archives at Furman University. She is the Poet Laureate of South Carolina. Ms. Wentworth works as a book publicist.
Robert E. Wood teaches in the School of Literature, Communication, and Culture at Georgia Tech. His poetry has appeared in such journals as Cha, Blue Fifth Review, Jabberwock Review, Sojourn, Minnetonka Review and Prairie Schooner. His chapbook, Gorizia Notebook, was published by Finishing Line Press in August 2009.
Chad Davidson is the author of The Last Predicta (2008) and Consolation Miracle (2003), both on Southern Illinois UP, as well as co-author with Gregory Fraser of Writing Poetry: Creative and Critical Approaches (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2009). He has work forthcoming or recently appearing in Boston Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Ploughshares, Virginia Quarterly Review, and others. He teaches literature and creative writing at the University of West Georgia near Atlanta.
Gerry LaFemina's newest book, Vanishing Horizon, will be out in January of 2011.?His other books include the poetry collections The Window Facing Winter and The Parakeets of Brooklyn, and the story collection Wish List.?He directs teh Frostburg Center for Creative Writing at Frostburg State University, where he also teaches.
Joel Brouwer was born in Grand Rapids, Michigan, in 1968, and educated at Sarah Lawrence College and Syracuse University. He is the author of Exactly What Happened (Purdue University Press, 1999), which received the Larry Levis Prize from Virginia Commonwealth University, Centuries (Four Way?Books, 2003), a National Book Critics Circle "Notable Book," and And So (Four Way Books, 2009). He has held fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, the Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundation, and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. His poems, essays, and reviews have appeared in AGNI, Boston Review, Chelsea, Crazyhorse, Georgia Review, Gettysburg Review, Iowa Review, Massachusetts Review, New England Review, The New York Times Book Review, Paris Review, Parnassus, Ploughshares, Poetry, The Progressive, Tin House, Washington Post Book World, and other publications. He lives in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, and teaches at The University of Alabama.