Beth Ann Fennelly, one of America’s most accomplished and widely published poets, lives in Oxford, MS with her husband, fiction writer Tom Franklin, and their three children. She teaches poetry and nonfiction writing at University of Mississippi. Fennelly has published three full-length poetry books. Her first, Open House, won the 2001Kenyon Review Prize and the Great Lakes College Association New Writers Award. It also was a Book Sense Top Ten Poetry Pick. It was reissued by W. W. Norton in 2009. Her second book, Tender Hooks, and her third, Unmentionables, were published by W. W. Norton in 2004 and 2008. Her chapbook A Different Kind of Hunger, published by the Texas Review Press, won the 1997 Texas Review Breakthrough Award. Her poems have been anthologized in Poets of the New Century, The Penguin Book of the Sonnet, The Best American Poetry 1996, and The Pushcart Prize 2001 and others. She also published a book of nonfiction, Great with Child, in 2006, with Norton. As a Contributing Editor to The Oxford American, she frequently writes essays on Southern food, music, and books. In 2011, she was named Mississippi Humanities Teacher of the Year and College of Liberal Arts Teacher of the Year. Fennelly and Franklin frequently are both selected to be in the same anthologies, such as The Alumni Grill: Anthology of Southern Writers, edited by the late William Gay and Suzanne Kingsbury. This year, however they reached a new level of togetherness with publication of their co-authored novel, The Tilted World, which is receiving a lot advance praise from peers and critics. Beth Ann and Tom will appear at Words & Music as members of the faculty and Beth Ann is final round judge for the poetry category of The William Faulkner – William Wisdom Creative Writing Competition.