Fleda Brown's poems have appeared in Poetry, The Kenyon Review, The Southern Review, American Poetry Review, The Georgia Review, and many other journals, and they have been used as texts for several prizewinning musical compositions which have been performed at Eastman School of Music and at Yale University.
Her first collection of poems, Fishing With Blood (Purdue University Press), won the Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award in 1988. In 1993, Do Not Peel the Birches (Purdue University Press) was chosen by Gerald Stern as winner of the Verna Emery Prize. Her third collection, The Devil's Child, was published in 1999 by Carnegie Mellon University Press. She also has a limited edition book of poems and images, The Eleusinian Mysteries MS, with Norman Sasowsky (Moment Press, 1992) and a chapbook, The Earliest House (Yarrow, 1993). She has written essays on William Dean Howells and Mark Twain, as well as on D.H. Lawrence and other contemporary British writers. She is co-editor of Critical Essays on D.H. Lawrence, published in 1988 by G.K. Hall. She has also written on teaching and writing poetry.
Brown grew up in Arkansas, and in 2001 she was awarded that state's premier poetry prize, The Porter Fund Prize for Literary Excellence. She is now professor of English at the University of Delaware, where she directs the Graduate Student Poets in the Schools program. She and her husband, Jerry Beasley, live in Newark, Delaware. She is poet laureate of Delaware.
