About me

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 book: 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 an love 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.