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 Fleda Brown was born in Columbia, Missouri, and grew up in Fayetteville, Arkansas. She earned her Ph.D. in English (specialty in American Literature) from the University of Arkansas, and in 1978 she joined the faculty of the University of Delaware English Department, where she founded the Poets in the Schools Program, which she directed for more than twelve years. Her books, essays, and individual poems have won many awards. Her sixth collection of poems, Reunion (2007), was the winner of the Felix Pollak Prize from the University of Wisconsin. She has read and lectured in secondary schools, retirement communities, libraries, bookstores, a prison for delinquent adolescents, Rotary Clubs, AAUWs, and many universities and colleges, from Oxford University, London, to small liberal arts colleges. She has slept in a bunkhouse and has read with cowboy poets in North Dakota, and she has read for the Governor of Delaware and for the Delaware Legislature. She served as poet laureate of Delaware from 2001-2007, when she retired from the University of Delaware and moved to Traverse City, Michigan. She teaches in the Rainier Writing Workshop, a low-residency MFA program at Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, WA, and she spends summers with her husband, also a retired English professor, at their cottage on a small lake in northern Michigan. Between them, they have four children and ten grandchildren.
You can contact Fleda at
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Order at Amazon.com  Winner of the 2007 Felix Pollak Prize in Poetry, selected by Linda Gregerson.
The neighborly language of local exchange and local enchantment, slipknot and memory, cell-stream and the surgeon's knife, runs like springwater through the poems of Fleda Brown. So perfectly tempered are the apprehensions of metaphor, so cunning are the felicities of form—rhyming as natural as human breath!—we're tempted to think it's not art at all. Except for the radiance, which only art, and a generous mind, can make. — Linda Gregerson “Things fall apart,” Yeats wrote. They do in these poems. Memories, geography, the past, family, names, the body, the expanding universe—Brown scatters all these into pieces, spread across imagination’s space. But she seeks as well to compose—or at least to imply the possibility of—their reunion. Astonishingly, she succeeds. In these reunions, cast in an impressive variety of forms, Brown manages her signature, magical metamorphoses, poetry skying at its best, yet, somehow, never leaving the ground it rises from. In “Knife,” a prose arrangement about recovery from brain surgery, she writes, “Flight with its maddeningly invisible wings marries the lumbering form of things and agrees not to give up, never to give up on each other.” That each other is the center of these poems. — Dabney Stuart |
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