Robert Morgan
Robert Morgan was born in Hendersonville, North Carolina and grew up on the family farm in the Green River Valley of the Blue Ridge Mountains. He started out in engineering and applied mathematics at North Carolina State University, but transferred to UNC-Chapel Hill, receiving his bachelor’s in English in 1965 and his master’s from UNC-Greensboro in 1968. Morgan's first book, Zirconia Poems, was published in 1969. Since then he has published several books of poetry such as: Land Diving, Trunk & Thicket, Groundwork, Sigodlin, Green River: New and Selected Poems and Topsoil Road. Morgan has also published short story collections: The Blue Valleys, The Mountains Won’t Remember Us and The Balm of Gilead Tree: New and Selected Stories. His story “The Balm of Gilead Tree” was included in the 1997 O. Henry Awards anthology. He has published a novella Good Measure and several novels: The Hinterlands, The Truest Pleasure, Gap Creek and This Rock. The Truest Pleasure was a Publisher’s Weekly notable book and a finalist for the Southern Book Critics Circle Award. The New York Times bestseller, Gap Creek received the 2000 Southern Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction, the Appalachian Writers Association 2000 Book of the Year, was chosen as a Notable Book by the New York Times and was a selection of the Oprah Book Club. His most recent book, Boone: A Biography received the 2008 Thomas Wolfe Prize. Robert has received numerous grants and was awarded a Guggenheim and Rockefeller Foundation fellowship. He received the James G. Hanes Poetry Prize by the Fellowship of Southern Writers, and the North Carolina Literature Award in 1991. He is currently Kappa Alpha Professor of English at Cornell.
