B.H. Fairchild

“B.H. Fairchild was born in 1942 in Houston, Texas, and grew up in small towns in Texas and Kansas. The son of a lathe operator, he attended the University of Kansas and the University of Tulsa. His poetry explores the empty landscapes of the region of his birth, and the lives of its working-class residents. Frequently described as a poet of the “sacred,” Fairchild’s work has gained renown for its marriage of high and low culture and art, as well as its interest in evoking beauty in quotidian memories and events.”

“Fairchild has received numerous honors and awards for his work, including fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation. He is the recipient of the William Carlos Williams Award, the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, the Aiken Taylor Award, the Arthur Rense Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the PEN Center USA West Poetry Award, among others. His work appears widely and he has taught at numerous institutions. He is currently a professor of English at the University of North Texas.”

Fairchild’s books of poetry include The Arrival of the Future (1985; reissued 2000); The Art of the Lathe (1998), which received the Beatrice Hawley Award and was a finalist for the National Book Award; Early Occult Memory Systems of the Lower Midwest (2004), winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, the California Book Award, and the Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry; Local Knowledge (2005); and Usher: Poems (2009). Fairchild has also written a critical study on the poetry of William Blake, Such Holy Song: Music as Idea, Form, and Image in the Poetry of William Blake (1980).”

Quoted from https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/b-h-fairchild