Fall 2010 Program

As a teenager growing up on his family's farm in Blue Ridge Mountains' Green River valley, Morgan was interested in composing music as well as writing poetry and fiction. But as he explains on his web site, "I was encouraged to study science in those 'Beat the Russian" years after the first Sputnik was launched," and indeed, he embarked on studies in engineering and applied mathematics at NC State. After his first writing teacher at NC State encouraged him to write stories and poems of people and places he knew growing up, Morgan says "One day he brought one of my stories to class, an account of visiting a great-grandmother in an old house in the mountains, and announced he had wept when he read the story. This was better praise than I had gotten in math classes, and I was hooked on writing." Thus began what has become a prolific writing career.

Although his earliest publications were short stories, his work covers a variety of genres. In the early 1960s, he became enthralled with poetry, publishing his first poetry collection, Zirconia Poems, in 1969. Three more books of poetry followed in the next ten years (Land Diving, 1976; Trunk & Thicket, 1978; and Groundwork, 1979). In 1980, he again began writing fiction, publishing his first book of short stories, The Blue Valleys (nominated for the First Fiction Award, American Academy of Arts and Letters), in 1989, followed by more poetry. After more stories, essays and interviews, Morgan turned to novels. His second novel, The Truest Pleasure (1995), garnered several honors: it was listed by Publishers Weekly as one of the outstanding books of 1995; was first runner-up for The Southern Book Critics Circle Award; and was selected as a New York Times Notable Book. His novel Gap Creek (1999) also received recognition (it was the recipient of the Southern Book Critics Circle Award for 2000, selected as a Notable Book by the New York Times, an Oprah's Book Club selection for January 2000, a New York Times best seller, and the Association of Appalachian Writers named it book of the year for 2000).

More story and poetry collections followed, among them The Balm of Gilead Tree and Other Stories, whose title story was included in the 1997 O. Henry Awards anthology, and The Strange Attractor: New and Selected Poems (2004). His latest collection of poetry, Morgan's Crossing (September 2009), has been hailed by the News & Observer's Michael Chitwood as displaying "the rich, grounded work that he does so well...There's music aplenty in Morgan's work, and his portraits not only capture the daily lives of the people of the North Carolina mountains but always manage to get at an even larger canvas, to find the common human story that we all share, no matter our particular location" ("Mountains Make Fertile Ground," News & Observer, December 13, 2009, p. D9).

Morgan's Boone: A Biography (2007), about the life of Daniel Boone, was a finalist for the Los Angeles Book Award. He has also published numerous poems, essays, and articles in a wide variety of magazines, journals, and anthologies.

Morgan has been teaching at Cornell University since 1971. He has served as the Kappa Alpha Professor of English at Cornell since 1992. He has also held numerous visiting writer and professorship positions throughout that time at a variety of institutions, including Appalachian State University, East Carolina University, Duke University, Furman University, and Davidson College.

He has received numerous honors and awards for his work, including NEA grants in 1974, 1981, and 1987. In 1988, he was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship and a Rockefeller Foundation fellowship. In 1991, he was awarded the James G. Hanes Poetry Prize by the Fellowship of Southern Writers and the North Carolina Literature Award.

He and his wife live in Ithaca, New York.

Spring 2011 Program