Wyatt Prunty
Photo courtesy of Sewanee Writers' Conference

The son of a World War II veteran, Wyatt Prunty was born in Tennessee in 1947 and raised in Athens, Georgia. After receiving his bachelor’s degree in English from Sewanee: The University of the South, he served in the U.S. Navy as a gunnery officer on the USS Wright and the USS Spiegle Grove, serving in the Mediterranean, the Caribbean and the North and South Atlantic. After his discharge in 1972, Prunty resumed his academic studies, receiving a Masters in Poetry from Johns Hopkins University and a Ph.D. from Louisiana State University. He has written six volumes of poetry, including The Times Between (1982), What Women Know, What Men Believe (1986), The Run of the House (1993), and Unarmed and Dangerous: New and Selected Poems (2000). The New York Times Book Review has praised Prunty’s poems, stating that "he displays an inherent understanding of the fact that comedy and tragedy, both on the page and off, coexist more often than not." Prunty is Carlton Professor of English at Sewanee: The University of the South where he founded and directs the Sewanee Writers' Conference and edits the Sewanee Writers’ Series, which is published in conjunction with Overlook Press.

He could lie on his back and navigate Across a ceiling as close and clear As the luminous face of his father’s watch, His father gone, flying for Nimitz And Bull Halsey.

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