Betty Adcock

Elizabeth Sharp Adcock (born September 16, 1938) is an American poet and a 2002–2003 Guggenheim Fellow. Author of six poetry collections, she has served as a faculty member in the Warren Wilson College MFA Program for Writers in Asheville, North Carolina and in the Writer-in-Residence program at Meredith College in Raleigh, North Carolina. She has also held residencies at Lenoir-Rhyne College, Kalamazoo College, and Duke University, and has twice served as Visiting Distinguished Professor at North Carolina State University. Adcock's work has been cited as a major influence on substantial artists such as 2006 Pulitzer Poetry winner Claudia Emerson.

Life The daughter of a landowner and a schoolteacher, Adcock grew up in San Augustine, Texas, a small farming community. The landscape of the area, a mix of West and Deep South, influenced her work. She moved to North Carolina after her marriage to Donald Adcock, who died in 2011. The two have a daughter, Sylvia.

Adcock is primarily self-taught. She has no degrees, She studied and wrote poetry for more than ten years while working in the business world. After her first book was published, she was awarded a teaching residency at Duke University. Other teaching positions followed, most notably her ongoing position as Writer in Residence at Meredith College, which she held until 2006. Walking out: Poems, 1975 Nettles: Poems, 1983 Beholdings: Poems, 1988 The Difficult Wheel: Poems, 1995 Intervale: New and Selected Poems, 2001 (winner of the Poets' Prize and a finalist for the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize) Slantwise: Poems, 2008 (Louisiana State University Press L.E. Phillabaum Prize volume for 2008) Widow Poems, 2014 Rough Fugue, 2017

Awards Adcock's awards include the following: State of North Carolina Artist Fellowship in Poetry, 1988 North Carolina Award for Literature, 1996 Texas Institute of Letters Prize, 1996 Sam Ragan Award in Fine Arts, 1998 Guggenheim Fellowship, 2002 Poets' Prize, 2003 Two Pushcart Prizes National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry