PROFILE
Alice Fulton, major contemporary American poet, is the author of “The Nightingales of Troy: Stories of One Family’s Century” (2008)— a humorous, deeply moving first collection of stories that take place in her native Troy, NY. Composed of ten interlinked tales, the book features four generations in the family of the colorful Garrahan sisters and their female descendants.
 
In advance praise, Alison Lurie said, “‘The Nightingales of Troy’ should establish [Fulton] as one of the best writers of fiction working today.” Writing in the “Boston Globe,” Anna Mundow said, “With ‘The Nightingales of Troy’… [an] outstanding first fiction collection, poet Alice Fulton reveals herself to be triumphantly at home in the short story. Spanning the 20th century - from a farm birth in 1908 to an MRI in 1999 - Fulton's stories are sublime distillations, not only of the individual lives they so eloquently describe, but also of the eras throughout which the formidable Garrahan family endures.” Writing in the “Los Angeles Times Book Review,” Susan Salter Reynolds said, “You can’t fake quirkiness; it requires soul. Alice Fulton is a poet; here she is writing her first novel.... Boy, oh boy, was it worth waiting for!”
Winner of a MacArthur Foundation “genius grant,” Fulton is best-known for poetry that explores the semi-random processes of the human mind. Her work has been included in five editions of “The Best American Poetry” series and in the 10th Anniversary edition, “The Best of the Best American Poetry, 1988-1997.”

Her most recent poetry collections are “Cascade Experiment: Selected Poems” (2004) and “Felt” (2001), winner of the Bobbitt National Prize of the Library of Congress and a finalist for the “Los Angeles Times” Book Award. Writing in the “Harvard Review,” Kathleen Rooney said of “Cascade Experiment,” Alice Fulton is not a safe poet; she's a daring, ambitious, and risk-taking one, and, as the magnificent pieces gathered together in ‘Cascade Experiment’ so eloquently and scintillatingly demonstrate, she has been so throughout her lengthy and deservedly successful career… Poetry as a whole would be much enlivened if poets everywhere could take a cue from her and engage in experimentation of their own.” The “New York Times” reviewer, Megan Harlan, said of “Felt,” “In poems obsessed with identity, yearning and intimacy, the power of Fulton’s verbal pyrotechnics is that they precisely animate these mutable, ever-changing states.”

Other collections include the essay collection, “Feeling as a Foreign Language: The Good Strangeness of Poetry” (1999), and the poetry volumes, “Sensual Math” (1996), “Powers of Congress” (1990), the National Poetry Series winner “Palladium” (1986), and “Dance Script With Electric Ballerina” (1982), winner of the Associated Writing Programs Award.

Fulton’s work has appeared in the “New Yorker,” “Paris Review,” “Poetry,” “Atlantic Monthly” and “New Republic.” She currently serves as the Ann S. Bowers Professor of English at Cornell University.