BROOKS HAXTON

Brooks Haxton, born in Greenville, Mississippi, in 1950, is the son of the writer Ellen Douglas and the composer Kenneth Haxton. His four collections of original poems published by Alfred A. Knopf have been Nakedness, Death, and the Number Zero, 2001, The Sun at Night, 1995, Traveling Company, 1989, and Dominion, 1985. He has also published two book-length narrative poems, The Lay of Eleanor and Irene, 1985, and Dead Reckoning, 1989. His book of translations of ancient Greek poetry, Dances for Flute and Thunder, was one of three nominees for the 2000 PEN Poetry in Translation Award. His translation, Fragments: the Collected Wisdom of Heraclitus, an alternate selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club, was published in 2001, and his translation of Selected Poems by Victor Hugo in 2002. His most recent collection of original poems from Knopf, Nakedness, Death, and the Number Zero, won the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Poetry Prize in 2002. His next collection of original poems, Uproar: Antiphonies to Psalms, will be published by Knopf in April 2004. He wrote the script for Tennessee Williams: Orpheus of the American Stage, a film nationally broadcast in the American Masters Series on PBS in December of 1995. A recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the Ingram Merrill Foundation, the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Washington, D.C., Council for the Arts, and Syracuse University, he teaches in the Syracuse University M.F.A. Program Writing in Creative Writing, and at the M.F.A. Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. He lives in Syracuse with his wife, Dr. Frances Haxton, a psychiatrist, and their three children, Isaac, Miriam, and Lillie.