Alice Fulton

A native of Troy, New York, Alice Fulton began writing poetry in high school, citing a 1979 women’s poetry conference in Amhurst, Massachusetts as an early influence on her poetic life. She has won several fellowships throughout her life, including the Guggenheim, the MacArthur, and the National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships. Her first full volume of poetry, Dance Script With Electric Ballerina (1983), won the Associated Writing Programs Award, and thus her career as a poet was launched.

Fulton has published several volumes of poetry since her first book, including Palladium, winner of the 1985 National Poetry Series and the 1987 Society of Midland Authors Award, as well as Felt (2001), which was awarded the 2002 Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry from the Library of Congress.

Also an accomplished essayist, Fulton’s Feeling as a Foreign Language: The Good Strangeness of Poetry (1999) relates scientific theories with the writing and reading of poetry. While teaching at the University of Michigan, Fulton became friends with composer William Bolcolm, who consulted with her in writing his song cycle I Will Breathe a Mountain.

–Christie Finn