Little Ease
Aaron McCollough
An extended bio from the author.
I was born in Columbus, Ohio, where my father taught Archeology and my mother taught English. We moved to Knoxville, Tennessee before I was 1. I think I was a very happy child until we moved to Chattanooga, Tennessee when I was 6. Maybe unhappiness visits naturally around that age. I was an average student until later high school, where I developed a love for poetry, especially Romanticism, Modernism, and the Beats, as well as a powerful obsession with William Faulkner. My parents tried to anticipate any and all plausible vocations by exposing me to everything—every way of being—they could imagine. That I became a poet was a shock, I think, but one they took with dignity.
I went to college at the University of the South (also called Sewanee). There I was a good student and a melancholic. I worked for a short time as a copy editor after college and then in a variety of positions, many of which included the sale of records. Before going to graduate school, I entered an editorial collaboration with a college friend on an oral/social history of a Gullah community on South Carolina’s Waccamaw Neck. I completed masters degrees at North Carolina State University, the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and the University of Michigan. Currently, I am in the final stages of my dissertation at Michigan. My wife Suzanne Chapman is an archivist. She specializes in digital resource collections. Our cells are close enough that we can sing one another to sleep.
Aaron McCollough’s book Welkin was winner of the 2002 Sawtooth Poetry Prize, chosen by Brenda Hillman.
