BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
Poet and university professor Archie Randolph Ammons was born near
Whiteville, N.C., in 1926. He earned a reputation as one of the nation's
leading poets in the decades after he joined the Cornell University faculty in
1963, becoming Goldwin Smith Professor of Poetry a decade later. Recipient of
the Bollingen Prize and the National Book Award and Critics Circle Award for
poetry, Ammons was one of the first recipients of a MacArthur Foundation
fellowship in 1981.
