James Davis May
Photo by Jeff Roffman
Bio
James Davis May was born in Pittsburgh and now lives in Georgia, where he directs the creative writing program at Mercer University and curates the poetry track at the Decatur Book Festival. His first poetry collection, Unquiet Things, was published by Louisiana State University Press as part of the Goat Island Poetry Series, an imprint edited by the late Claudia Emerson. He has received fellowships from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference and Inprint, and his poems have appeared in American Life in Poetry, Best New Poets 2015, the New Republic, the Southern Review, and other publications. In 2016, his poem “Ed Smith” won the Poetry Society of America’s Cecil Hemley Memorial Award. In addition to a second collection of poems titled Unusually Grand Ideas, he is writing a memoir that addresses mental health, poetry, and fatherhood.
Major depressive disorder swallowed up months and perhaps years of my life, stretches where I could assemble myself just long enough to go to work, only to come home and disappear into a dark room for the remainder of the day. Getting out of that situation was a slow, difficult process, and I would not have made it without the support of my wife and daughter.
When I started writing about my experience with depression, the poems were, predictably, dark, though something made them feel like tiny acts of survival—ways of, if not controlling that darkness, then at least understanding it. And though I cared deeply about those poems, I worried that they’d be too private or too, well, depressing for anyone else to enter. Receiving a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship for my manuscript in progress, then, does a lot to refute those doubts.
I hope to use the time and resources this fellowship will provide to continue to develop that manuscript and new projects that explore the intersections between fatherhood, poetry, and mental health.