Quarantine

Brian Henry

An extended bio from the author

I was born September 17, 1972 in Columbus, Ohio. My family moved to Richmond, Virginia when I was 6, and my parents divorced a couple of years later. I attended public schools in the Richmond area, then went to the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, where I majored in English literature and served as Poetry Editor of The William and Mary Review (with Andrew Zawacki as Editor). This editorial relationship and friendship returned in a slightly different form less than a year after Andrew and I graduated from college, when we became co-editors of the international journal Verse in 1995. At the time, I was in my first year of the MFA program at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, taking creative writing and literature classes with Dara Wier, James Tate, Agha Shahid Ali, Glyn Maxwell, Martín Espada, Paul Mariani, and Peggy O’Brien. I worked as a research assistant for the Irish Studies Program for a year, and attended the 1996 Yeats summer school in Sligo. As a graduate student, my poems and criticism appeared in various journals, including Harvard Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Shenandoah, Hanging Loose, and Poetry Ireland Review. I finished the MFA program in 1997, then moved to Melbourne, Australia on a Fulbright Scholarship. In Australia, I edited a special feature of Verse devoted to Australian poetry, edited an American poetry feature of the Australian journal Meanjin, wrote criticism on Australian and American poetry, and participated in various literary festivals and conferences around the country.

My first teaching position, at Plymouth State College in New Hampshire, brought me into contact with several young poets of exceptional talent and promise—particularly Ethan Paquin, Andrew Morgan, and Jon Link. My daughter was born in November 1999, and my first book, Astronaut, appeared in England in January 2000 and was later shortlisted for the Forward Prize. The book also appeared that year in Slovenia in translation with an introduction by Tomaz Salamun. (Astronaut appeared in the U.S. in 2002 from Carnegie Mellon University Press.) In the summer of 2000, we moved to Athens, Georgia, where I worked with an array of outstanding poets—Laura Solomon, Travis Nichols, Paul Killebrew, Monica Fambrough, Christina Mengert, Sara Henning, Seth Parker, Brad Flis, Natalie Lyalin, Lyndsey Cohen, Chris McDermott, Heidi Peppermint, Lew Klatt, and others. At Georgia, I continued to edit Verse, often with student assistance, and directed the creative writing program for two years.

My second book, the multi-genre (and messy) American Incident, appeared in December 2002 from Salt Publishing. The book was intended in part to counter the compact structure and lyrical orientation of Astronaut. My third book, Graft, appeared in 2003 in England from Arc Publications and in the U.S. from New Issues. I also published two edited volumes— On James Tate (University of Michigan Press, 2004) and, with Zawacki, The Verse Book of Interviews (Verse Press, 2005). My son was born in September 2004. In 2005, I accepted a position teaching literature and creative writing at the University of Richmond in Virginia, returning home after more than a decade of living elsewhere.