Before his death in 2024, Fred Chappell published more than thirty volumes of poetry and prose. Honors bestowed on his work include the Bollingen Prize, the Aiken Taylor Award, the T. S. Eliot Prize, and the Thomas Wolfe Prize. His fiction was translated into more than a dozen languages and received the Best Foreign Book Award from the Acadamie Francaise. A native of Canton in the mountains of western North Carolina, Chappell was the state's poet laureate from 1997 to 2002 and an English professor at the University of North Carolina-Greensboro for forty years.
