Archie Randolph Ammons, 1926 -
Poet and teacher A. R. Ammons was born in North Carolina in 1926. He served his country during World War II aboard a U.S. Navy destroyer escort in the South Pacific, which is where he began writing poetry. After he returned from duty, he attended Wake Forest College, North Carolina and the University of California, Berkley. He began teaching at Cornell University in 1964 and, in 1971, became a Goldwin Smith Professor of Poetry there.
Ammons has authored nearly 30 books of poetry and some of those titles include "Garbage" (1993), which won the National Book Award and the Library of Congress's Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry; "A Coast of Trees" (1981), which received the national Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry; "Sphere" (1974), which received the Bollingen Prize; and "Collected Poems 1951-1971" (1972), which won the National Book Award. Other honors include the Academy's Tanning Prize, the Poetry Society of America's Robert Frost Medal and the Ruth Lilly Prize. He has also received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Archie Randolph Ammons died on February 25, 2001.
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