Roger Mitchell, author of eight books or poetry, a work of nonfiction and numerous reviews and essays.


Roger Mitchell is the author of nine books of poetry, a work of nonfiction, and numerous reviews and essays. 

His work has appeared in leading journals in the U.S. and abroad and has been anthologized more than thirty times. Awards for this work include the Midland Poetry Award for his first book, Letters From Siberia, the John Ben Snow Award for Clear Pond: The Reconstruction of a Life, a work of nonfiction, for which he was also made an honorary citizen of the Town of North Hudson in Essex County, New York, and the Akron Prize in Poetry for his previous book, Delicate Bait. He has twice received a fellowship in Creative Writing from the National Endowment for the Arts.

For many years he taught in and directed the MFA program at Indiana University–Bloomington and was for ten years Director of that university's summer writers' conference. Today he lives in Jay, New York, in the Adirondack Mountains, with his wife, the fiction writer, Dorian Gossy. This is the part of the world he came from. Their piece of it is part of an old farm in the Ausable Valley with

                              low hills clustered thick
                        around some rocks the river hasn’t budged
                        in ten thousand years. Tools and their uses
                        scattered along the fence, only a few
                        of which I recognize, but, clear or not,
                        I carry what I can lift out to the field,
                        and make a few arrangements out of things
                        that, if they didn’t give life, made it work.
                                                            —from “Farmers”

Roger Mitchell has taught creative writing to people of all ages and to many groups outside the university. He is available for readings, lectures, and conferences. To buy his books or to contact him for appearances, click on one of the appropriate links above.

Education
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Awards and Distinctions

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