Fleda Brown won the Felix Pollak Prize for her poetry manuscript, Reunion, published by the University of Wisconsin in 2007. She is the author of five previous collections: The Women Who Loved Elvis All Their Lives (Carnegie Mellon Univ. Press, 2004), Breathing In, Breathing Out (winner of the Philip Levine Prize, Anhinga Press, 2002), The Devil's Child (Carnegie Mellon, 1999), Do Not Peel the Birches (Purdue Univ. Press, 1993), and Fishing With Blood (winner of the Great Lakes Colleges New Writer's Award, Purdue, 1988). Her poems have appeared in Poetry, Kenyon Review, Southern Poetry Review, American Poetry Review, The Georgia Review, and many other journals and anthologies, and they have been used as texts for several prizewinning musical compositions performed at Eastman School of Music, Yale University, and by the Pittsburgh New Music Ensemble.

She a retired professor of English at the University of Delaware and is on the faculty of the Rainier Writing Workshop, a low-residency MFA program at Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, WA. She served as poet laureate of Delaware from 2001-2007. She grew up in Fayetteville, Arkansas, spending summers in her family cottage in northern Michigan. She and her husband, Jerry Beasley, also a retired professor of English, now live in Traverse City, Michigan, an hour's drive from the cottage.

Here are links to a few places where you can read her work online:

• Nine of her poems, including “Through Security,” “Trillium” and “The Women Who Loved Elvis All Their Lives,” are posted in on her own Web site.
• You can also view a two-part video interview at FledaBrown.com, in which she speaks about such topics as “how I use form... poems and family, the difference between poetry and therapy, how to read a poem, how to ‘take’ criticism as a writer, what inspires me, what writers influence me, and... advice for young poets.”
• More of her poems appear at her Delaware Poet Laureate Web site, including “For the Inauguration of William Jefferson Clinton, 1997” and “Language,” together with videos entitled “How a Poem Works” and “What a Poet Does.”
• “Elegy For A Woman Killed On New London Road By A Flying Deer” and “Poem For Our Twelfth Wedding Anniversary” were published in both text and RealAudio in The Cortland Review, Issue 27 (Winter 2005). “Road To Damascus” is in Issue 19 (February 2002).
• “Under the Eaves” (in memory of William Matthews) was posted at Verse Daily in 2005.

To purchase Brown’s books, use these shopping links:

• Fishing with Blood (poems, Purdue University Press, 1988)
  
• Do Not Peel the Birches (poems, Purdue University Press, 1993)
  
• Devil’s Child (narrative poems, Carnegie Mellon University Press, 1998)
  
• Breathing In, Breathing Out (poems, Anhinga Press, 2002)
  
• The Women Who Loved Elvis All Their Lives (poems, Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2004)
  
• Reunion (poems, University of Wisconsin Press, 2007)
  

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