About

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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 12 years. Her books, essays, and individual poems have won many awards. Her tenth collection of poems, The Woods Are On Fire: New and Selected Poems, was chosen by Ted Kooser for his Contemporary Poetry Series from the University of Nebraska Press in 2017. Her collection of memoir-essays, Driving With Dvorak, was published in 2010 by the University of Nebraska Press. Her memoir with Sydney Lea, Growing Old in Poetry: Two Poets: Two Lives, came out in 2018 from Green Mountain Press. She has co-edited two books, most recently On the Mason-Dixon Line: An Anthology of Contemporary Delaware Writers.

Fleda 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, Cambridge, 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. In Traverse City, she writes a monthly column on poetry for the Record-Eagle newspaper, and she has a commentary on poetry on Interlochen Public Radio. After 15 years on the faculty, she has retired from the Rainier Writing Workshop, a low-residency MFA program at Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, WA. She spends summers with her husband, Jerry Beasley, 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 reach her at fleda@udel.edu