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Beth Ann Fennelly (born May 22, 1971) is an American poet and prose writer.
She was born in New Jersey and raised in Lake Forest, Illinois. She earned a BA magna cum laude from the University of Notre Dame in 1993. After graduation, taught English for a year in a coal mining village on the Czech/Polish border. She later earned an MFA from the University of Arkansas, followed by the Diane Middlebrook Fellowship at the University of Wisconsin. She taught poetry at Knox College for two years. Since 2001, she's taught poetry and non-fiction at the University of Mississippi, where she directs the MFA Program. She's won several teaching awards, including Outstanding Liberal Arts Teacher of the Year (2011) and The University of Mississippi Humanities Teacher of the Year (2011).
Fennelly's first collection of poems, Open House, won multiple awards, including the Zoo Press Poetry Prize, the 2001 Kenyon Review Prize, the Great Lakes Colleges Association Award, and a Book Sense Top Ten Poetry Pick. Her poems have been included in numerous anthologies, including three editions of The Best American Poetry. She received a grant from the National Endowment of the Arts in 2002 and she has also won a Pushcart Prize. In 2009, she received a Fulbright grant to Brazil to study the poetry of Elizabeth Bishop. Her second and third books of poetry, Tender Hooks (2004) and Unmentionables (2008), were published by W. W. Norton.
Fennelly is a contributor to The Oxford American, where her essays fr..
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