Finalist for the 2023 Fugere Book Prize
Joseph Bathanti is the former North Carolina Poet Laureate (2012-14) and recipient of the North Carolina Award in Literature, the state’s highest civilian honor. He is the author of twenty books, most recently Light at the Seam, from LSU Press, winner of the 2022 Roanoke Chowan Prize, awarded annually by the North Carolina Literary and Historical Association for best book of poetry in a given year, and also winner of the 2023 Brockman-Campbell Award, given annually by the North Carolina Poetry Society, for the best book of poetry published by a NC poet in the previous year; and The Act of Contrition & Other Stories, winner of the Eastover Prize for Fiction, from Eastover Press, published in July of 2023. Bathanti is McFarlane Family Distinguished Professor of Interdisciplinary Education at Appalachian State University in Boone, North Carolina. He served as the 2016 Charles George VA Medical Center Writer-in-Residence in Asheville, NC, and is the co-founder of the Medical Center’s Creative Writing Program. For more information: https://english.appstate.edu/faculty-staff/directory/joseph-bathanti
Joseph Bathanti’s novella, The Stranger, the finalist of our 2023 Fugere Book Prize, will be released in the summer of 2025.
