Maurice Manning
Associate Professor
Ruth Lilly Professor of Poetry
M.F.A., University of Alabama, 2001
Associate Director of Creative Writing Maurice Manning is a native of Kentucky and the author of Lawrence Booth's Book of Visions, which was published in Spring 2001 by Yale University Press and which was the recipient of the 2000 Yale Series of Younger Poets Award, selected by W. S. Merwin. Manning’s second collection of poetry, A Companion for Owls: Being the Commonplace Book of D. Boone, Long Hunter, Back Woodsman, &c, was published in Fall 2004 by Harcourt. His poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Shenandoah, The Southern Review, Washington Square, Green Mountains Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, The Spoon River Poetry Review, Wind, Hunger Mountains, Black Warrior Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. He has held a fellowship to The Fine Arts Works Center in Provincetown.
Lawrence Booth's Book of Visions includes 58 poems featuring Lawrence Booth, a fictional character described by Publishers Weekly as "equal parts carnivorous nightmare, Freudian pastoral, and deep-fired family romance." Presenting a cast of allegorical and symbolic, yet very real, characters, Manning’s poems have "authority, daring, and a language of color and sure movement," wrote Yale Series of Younger Poets Award judge W. S. Merwin. A Companion for Owls is a collection of highly original narrative poems written in the voice of frontiersman Daniel Boone, a work that captures all the beauty and struggle of nascent America.
Manning's third book of poetry, Bucolics, was published by Harcourt in 2007.
Selected Publications (click images for more information)
The Common Man (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010).
Bucolics (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2007).
A Companion for Owls: Being the Commonplace Book of D. Boone, Long Hunter, Back Woodsman, & c. (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2004)
Lawrence Booth's Book of Visions (Yale University Press, 2001).
