Beth Ann Fennelly

Biography

Beth Ann Fennelly is the co-​​author with her husband, Tom Franklin, of The Tilted World (Morrow, 2013). Her poetry collections include Unmentionables (Norton, 2008), Tender Hooks (Norton, 2004), and her Kenyon Review Prize-​​winning first book, Open House (Zoo Press, 2002), in addition to the nonfiction book Great with Child: Letters to a Young Mother (Norton, 2006). She teaches poetry and nonfiction writing at the University of Mississippi.

See Work

ESSAYS / Summer 2014

All in Favor, Say “I”

By Beth Ann Fennelly

As a beginning writer I had a typically naïve conception of style as something added to a finished piece, as if the content is water and style the vase you pour it in—​a vase that shapes and decorates but doesn’t alter the chemistry of the...

CRITICISM / Fall 2013

Just Joking

By Beth Ann Fennelly

Andrew Hudgins’s The Joker, part memoir, part joke book, is so fresh and original that it seems without precursor. Like a good joke, it doubles our vision, inserts anarchy into logic, pleases us with its felicities of phrasing, and stuns us...