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William Pitt Root’s recent collections include STRANGE ANGELS (2013), SUBLIME BLUE: SELECTED EARLY ODES OF PABLO NERUDA (Wings Press, 2012), WHITE BOOTS: NEW AND SELECTED POEMS OF THE WEST (2006). In 2005, Carnegie Mellon Press re-issued THE STORM AND OTHER POEMS (originally from Atheneum, 1969) in their Contemporary Classics series. TRACE ELEMENTS FROM A RECURRING KINGDOM (Notable Book for 1994, The Nation) recollected Root's first five books. Earlier came FAULTDANCING, written near the intersection of the San Andreas and Mendocino Trench faults, REASONS FOR GOING IT ON FOOT, INVISIBLE GUESTS, STRIKING THE DARK AIR FOR MUSIC, FIRECLOCK, and others. His work appears in The New Yorker, The Nation, Atlantic Monthly, APR. Ploughshares, thedrunkenboat.com,and in anthologies including New Poets of the American West, Telling It Real, Comeback Wolves, Kindled Terraces: American Poets in Greece, The Generation Of 2000, Lexington Guide to Literature, New Yorker Book Of Poetry, and so on. WPR has been US/UK Exchange Artist (London & Cornwall), and a Fellow of the Rockefeller and Guggenheim Foundations, Stanford University, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Translated into nearly 20 languages, his poems have been nominated repeatedly for the Pulitzer Prize and have won the Stanley Kunitz Poetry Award from Columbia Magazine, the Guy Owen Poetry Prize from Southern Poetry Review, three Pushcart Prizes, and a $500 award from Winning Poets Best War Poem contest. Beside being broadcast over Voice of America and Liberation Radio, he has read throughout the U.S. at universities, art galleries, coffee houses, hotel rooftops, even a wedding, in England, Mexico, Scandinavia, South Africa, Vietnam, Western and Central Europe. A frequent featured teacher/poet at Prague Summer Programs and Meacham Writers Conference, UT, Chattanooga, Bill was a featured writer at the 2011 Sha'ar Poetry Festival in Tel Aviv, Israel. In 2008, he won Editor's Choice Award for his poem "Onion" in the Allen Ginsberg Poetry Competition; in 2010, he was finalist for the Neruda Prize at Nimrod. Hear Bill read his work with Molly Peacock at the Passaic Poetry Center on UTube.
For years Root commuted weekly from Arizona (he was Tucson's first Poet Laureate 1997-2002) to teach in the creative writing program at Hunter College in Manhattan. He’s taught at Michigan State and University of Montana, been Visiting Writer-in-residence at Amherst College, NYU, Interlochen Arts Academy, and Distinguished Writer-in-Residence at Pacific Lutheran and Wichita State University.He’s also taught as a Poet-in-the-Schools in nine states and on five Reservations, worked as a Teamster, a bouncer, a laborer in a shipyard, an underground mine, and even (just after Sputnik launched) as a zero gravity experimental subject for NASA.Bill and his wife, Pamela Uschuk, live mostly in Southwestern Colorado near the vast Weminuche Wilderness with a cadre of animal companions--the wolfish Mojo Buffalo Buddy and Zazu plus Sadie Kat. He loves to write, take photographs, hike with Pam, canoe or kayak with whoever’s handy, or head off for the backcountry in his old Land Cruiser with Mojo Buffalo Buddy.
William Pitt Root and his wolfish companion, Happy, at Raven's Word Writers Center in Durango, Colorado
Poetry Editor
Contact Information:
(970) 946-1077
wprpoet@mac.com
William Root was the John C. Hodges Visiting Writer at UNIVERSITY OF TENNESSEE-Knoxville.
"Root's voice is sinew, blood and bone--the well-muscled body carrying light--a gift of passion containing whole landscapes, legacies."
Naomi Shihab Nye
Buy Bill's books at www.wingspress.com or through your local independent bookstore. Also, available on Amazon.
