Master of Fine Arts Visiting Writer

Jesse Graves

Jon Hoppenthaler's books of poetry are Lives of Water (2003), Anticipate the Coming Reservoir (2008), and Domestic Garden (2015, winner of the Brockman-Campbell Award for the best volume of poetry published be a NC writer in 2015, chosen by Barbara Hamby), all with Carnegie Mellon University Press. With Kazim Ali, he has co-edited a volume of essays and interviews on the poetry of Jean Valentine, This-World Company (U Michigan P, 2012).

His poetry and essays appear in Ploughshares, Virginia Quarterly Review, Southern Review, New York Magazine, Barrow Street, Laurel Review, West Branch, The Literary Review, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Copper Nickel, Subtropics, Southern Humanities Review, Pleiades, Waccamaw, Blackbird, The Diagram, the anthologies A Face to Meet the Faces: An Anthology of Contemporary Persona Poetry (U of Akron P, 2012), The Incredible Sestina Anthology (Write Bloody Publishing, 2013), Blooming through the Ashes: An International Anthology on Violence and the Human Spirit (Rutgers UP, 2008), Making Poems: 40 Poems with Commentary by the Poets (State U of New York P, 2010), Literary Trails of Eastern North Carolina (U of North Carolina P, 2013), Poetry Calendar (Alhambra Publishing, 2006-2011), Southern Poetry Anthology VII: North Carolina (Texas Review Press, 2015), Eyes Burning at the Edge of the Woods: Fiction and Poetry from West Virginia (West Virginia UP, 2017), A Constellation of Kisses (Terrapin Books, 2019) and elsewhere.

He received his MFA in Poetry Writing from Virginia Commonwealth University. For the cultural journal Connotation Press: An Online Artifact, he edits “A Poetry Congeries, and he is on the advisory board for Backbone Press, a press dedicated to marginalized voices. For nine years he served as Personal Assistant to Toni Morrison. He is a Professor of Creative Writing and Literature at East Carolina University.