B. H. Fairchild

B.H. Fairchild was born in Houston, Texas and, as well as Houston, was raised in small towns in west Texas, Oklahoma, and southwest Kansas. He attended the University of Tulsa and University of Kansas, working part-time as technical writer for a nitroglycerin plant and English tutor to the Kansas basketball team. The Arrival of the Future was his first full-length book of poems, originally published by Swallow’s Tale Press in 1985 and recently republished in a new edition by Alice James Books. His third book, The Art of the Lathe, won the 1996 Capricorn Award, the Beatrice Hawley Award at Alice James Books in 1997, and was subsequently a Finalist for the National Book Award. It also received the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, the Williams Carlos Williams Award, the PEN West Poetry Award, the California Book Award, the Natalie Ornish Award from the Texas Institute of Letters, and an Honorable Mention for the Poet’s Prize. His poems have appeared in Southern Review, Poetry, Hudson Review, Yale Review, Paris Review, The New Yorker, Sewanee Review, and many other journals and in several anthologies, including The Best American Poems of 2000. He has been the recipient of fellowships and grants from the National Endowment of the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the Rockefeller Foundation. Fairchild is also the author of Such Holy Song, a study of William Blake. The American Academy of Arts and Letters recently awarded him the Arthur Rense Poetry Prize for “consistent excellence over a long career.”