Enid Shomer

A widely published writer nearly as well known for her fiction as for her poetry, Enid Shomer is the author of four collections of poetry: Stars at Noon: Poems from the Life of Jacqueline Cochran (University of Arkansas Press, 2001), Black Drum (Arkansas, 1997), This Close to the Earth (Arkansas, 1992) and Stalking the Florida Panther (The Word Works), which won the Washington Prize. Her poems have appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, Poetry, Paris Review, Best American Poetry, The New Criterion, Kenyon Review, Tikkun, etc. Her collection of stories, Imaginary Men, won the Iowa Fiction Prize as well as the LSU/Southern Review Prize, both given annually for the best first collection of short fiction by an American author. Her stories have appeared in The New Yorker, New Stories from the South, the Year's Best, Modern Maturity, New Letters, Prairie Schooner, Shenandoah, Virginia Quarterly Review, etc. Her stories, poems, and essays have been included in more than fifty anthologies and textbooks, including POETRY: A HarperCollins Pocket Anthology.

Shomer's many awards include two fellowships in poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts, three fellowships from the State of Florida, the Eunice Tietjens Prize from Poetry, the Celia Wagner Award of the Poetry Society of America, the Randall Jarrell Prize, Wildwood Prize, and Eve of St. Agnes Prize. Her poem sequence, Pope Joan, was adapted into a dance oratorio by composer Anne LeBaron and choreographer Mark Taylor and premiered in October of 2000. In fiction, she has also won the H.E. Frances Prize, the Iowa Woman Prize and, most recently, the 2004 Emily Clark Balch Prize from the Virginia Quarterly Review.

As a Visiting Writer, Shomer has taught at the University of Arkansas, Florida State University, and the Ohio State University, where she was the Thurber House Writer-in-Residence. Her book reviews and essays have appeared in The New Times Book Review, The Women's Review of Books, and elsewhere. Two of her books, Stars at Noon and Imaginary Men, were the subject of feature interviews on NPR's Morning Edition and also All Things Considered. Recently, she was appointed Poetry Series Editor for the University of Arkansas Press. Shomer lives in Tampa, Florida, and is currently at work on a novel.