Betsy Sholl

Profile

Betsy Sholl has published ten books of poetry, most recently As If a Song Could Save You,(University of Wisconsin Press 2022). Her previous books include House of Sparrows, New and Selected Poems (2019), winner of the Four Lakes Prize from the University of Wisconsin Press. Otherwise Unseeable (University of Wisconsin, 2014), won the 2014 Maine Literary Award for Poetry.

Her other books include Rough Cradle (Alice James, 2009) and Late Psalm (University of Wisconsin, 2004). Don’t Explain won the Felix Pollak Award (University of Wisconsin Press, 1997), and The Red Line won the 1991 AWP Prize for Poetry (University of Pittsburgh, 1992). From 2006 to 2011 she was Poet Laureate of Maine. She has had poems published recently or forthcoming in Brilliant Corners, Field, New Ohio Review, and Image. Three earlier collections of poetry came out with Alice James Books, where she was a founding member. A chapbook, Coastal Bop, came out with Oyster River Press in 2001. Her poems have appeared in many journals and anthologies, among them Field, Image, The Kenyon Review, The Massachusetts Review, and The Missouri Review. In 1991 she won the Maine Arts Commission Chapbook Competition. She is the recipient of an NEA Fellowship and two Maine Artists Fellowships. She has taught in the Writing Program at MIT and until recently taught at the University of Southern Maine. She was Poet Laureate of Maine from 2006 to 2011. She has performed some of her jazz poems with musicians Gary Wittner and Jim Cameron. She is currently poetry editor of the Maine Arts Journal.

In 2020, she received the Distinguished Achievement Award from Maine Writers and Publishers Association, and in 2022 an honorary Doctorate from the University of Southern Maine.