Betty Adcock

Betty Adcock is the author of six books of poetry, most recently Slantwise (LSU Press, 2008) and Intervale: New and Selected Poems (LSU, 2002), which won the Poets’ Prize and was a finalist for the Academy of American Poets’ Lenore Marshall Prize. She has been awarded two Pushcart Prizes, the North Carolina Medal for Literature, a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and a 2002 Guggenheim Fellowship, among others.
 
When asked in an interview what she hoped for in her poetry, Adcock replied, “to tell the truth and find that it is music.” Mary Oliver praised Adcock’s 1995 collection, The Difficult Wheel, saying Adcock “writes poems that are as upright as houses, and as flighty as clouds. She never postures. The poems … are beautiful, meaningful, and very real.”
 
Adcock was a writer-in-residence at Meredith College in Raleigh, North Carolina, for 20 years and teaches in the Warren Wilson College MFA Program.