Lawrence Hetrick grew up in Gainesville, Florida, where his father was professor of entomology at the university and his mother a botanical researcher for the Florida Game and Freshwater Fish Commission. At the University of Florida he studied with Andrew Lytle, Smith Kirkpatrick, Robert Bryan, and John Goggin. After receiving a B.A. in English, in 1962, he did graduate work in creative writing at the Johns Hopkins University, studying with Elliott Coleman and Richard Macksey. He taught briefly at the University of the South (Sewanee, Tennessee) and Miami-Dade Community College before returning to the University of Florida, where he taught the first course offerings in poetry writing in 1967. In 1986 he moved to Atlanta, Georgia, where he taught at DeKalb College (later Georgia Perimeter). He served as editor of the Chattahoochee Review from 1997 to 2004, receiving the Governor's Award in the Humanities in 2003.
Over the course of his career he has published a variety of genres in journals and anthologies, including poetry, fiction, memoir, interviews, reviews of art and books, and historical scholarship. He also draws and paints regularly, but the core of his artistic practice has always been writing poetry. He is currently Associate Professor of English at Georgia Perimeter College in Atlanta, where he lives with his wife, Tracy, two teenage children, and two dogs.
The author and artist have been friends since 1967.
About the Cover Artist for Derelict Tributaries
Michael Kemp moved to Florida in 1955 from his birthplace in the remote Adirondack Mountains. During a three year journey from Daytona to Miami to Jacksonville to Bartow, with more than a dozen school changes, he shifted his educational focus to individual reading. After high school and three years in the U.S. Navy, he moved to Gainesville, Florida, in 1967, pursuing a degree at the university in biology, but with much interaction with the artists and musicians of the 60s social scene. A travel year in Europe turned his attention decidedly to art, and he returned for a degree in painting and printmaking under Hiram Williams and Kenneth Kerslake. During his subsequent career as a rural librarian in Micanopy, Florida, he earned an MFA Summa cum Laude in printmaking with Kerslake. Since retiring from the Alachua County library system, in 2005, he has established Harmless Pleasures Printmaking, a semi-public studio in McIntosh, Florida, where he continues to print his own work and to assist clients in printmaking projects.
His work is represented by Hector Fine Art (Gainesville), Ice House Gallery (McIntosh), and 53 Cannon Galleries (Charleston). He lives in a hardwoods hammock between Micanopy and McIntosh with his wife, a dog, and three horses. The emphasis of his prints has always been on rendering nature and everyday experience in a modernist context using ancient, direct methods.