About William Wright
Hello, everyone! Welcome to my website. My name is William Wright, and my biggest joy in life is teaching and guiding others in their writing pursuits, as well as writing myself. I am author or editor of twenty-three nationally and internationally distributed books: seven full-length books, including Grass Chapels: New & Selected Poems (Mercer University Press, 2021) and four chapbooks, including April Creatures (Blue Horse Press, 2016). I also have two books, a novel and a distinct book of poems, coming out with Iris Press.
I have collaborated with writers and scholars Jesse Graves and Amy Wright, as well as the artist, Emoni Viruet, on book and lecturing projects, and my poems and books have garnered praise in many venues, including The Los Angeles Review of Books. I’ve published in journals such as Oxford American, Kenyon Review, Shenandoah, Southern Poetry Review, Terrain.org, North American Review, Rattle, and hundreds of other magazines and literary journals.
I am series editor and volume co-editor of The Southern Poetry Anthology (Texas Review Press), a multivolume celebration of contemporary Southern writers. I’m co-editor (with Daniel Cross Turner) of the critically acclaimed Hard Lines: Rough South Poetry (The University of South Carolina Press); and I co-edited (with Daniel Westover) an anthology of poems centered on the Victorian poet, Gerard Manley Hopkins (Clemson University Press & University of Liverpool Press).
My nonfiction appears in Shenandoah, Asheville Poetry Review, and in a forthcoming book published by Routledge centered on the digital humanities. My work has won the Appalachian Book of the Year Award, the Georgia Author of the Year Award, the Terrain.org Award, the Porter Fleming Prize in Literature, the South Carolina Poetry Initiative Prize, and many other honors.
I’ve taught creative writing and literature at Emory University, The University of Tennessee Knoxville (as Writer-in-Residence), Reinhardt University, and have directed masterclasses at over twenty universities throughout the United States. I earned a Ph.D. in Creative Writing (Poetry) and American Literature (while studying British Literature independently) at the University of Southern Mississippi’s Center for Writers, where I was selected as a Center for Writers Excellence in Teaching Fellow.
I am a lover of surrealist visual art, video games, the study of cosmology, and I am an unapologetic devotee of the music of J. S. Bach.
While I’ve done a lot in my few years on this planet, I still have a lot to learn, and I love the Socratic method of teaching: learning from students as I teach them. Please visit the links above for a closer look at work, and if I can help you with your creative writing—from getting started to editing, from formatting to publication, from pacing to concluding, contact me! I’ve helped hundreds of writers: essayists, novelists, poets, memoirists, and even folks working in multimedia. My clientele includes medical doctors, lawyers, professors of myriad disciplines (including creative writing!), working professionals, independent scholars, and graduate students, undergraduate students, and folks who just love to write!
If you have any questions about your work, send them my way.
Sincerely,