Awards & Grants

• Distinguished Alumnus Award, Kent State University, April 2012
• Long Lens: New & Selected Poems, a collection of poems, nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in 2010; the book was also winner of the Brockman-Campbell Award given by the North Carolina Poetry Society for the best book of poetry by a North Carolinian published in the previous year 2011.
• Honored with the Lee Smith Visiting Writer’s Chair, North Carolina State University, Spring 2008
• National Endowment for the Arts grant for Tar River Poetry, a journal he founded and edited from 1978-2006
• Honored with the title of “Distinguished Professor of Arts and Sciences” for career achievement as teacher and writer.  Cash award.  August 1996
• Fulbright Exchange Professorship, l’Université de Savoie, Chambéry, France, 1974-1975
• Essay on guns, “The Trouble With Smitty” (originally published in The Hudson Review, reprinted in The Sun)), among the “Notable Essays of 1999,” in Robert Atwan’s The Best American Essays of 2000.
• Essay “Trapping in Foreign Country,” winner of the Monroe Spears Award for the Best Essay to appear in The Sewanee Review in 2010 (Winter issue)
• Zoe Kincaid Brockman Award, cash prize and silver bowl for the best volume of poems (Pilgrims) by a North Carolinian in 1987
• Charity Randall Citation, a cash award and bronze plaque presented by the International Poetry Forum in Pittsburgh, PA., 1993
• Selected to lecture “Poets in Person” series, sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities, Spring 1996