William Carpenter

grew up in central Maine, graduated from Waterville High School, got a BA from Dartmouth, and a PhD from the University of Minnesota, where he held the University Doctoral Fellowship.  He was Assistant Professor of English & Humanities and Inland Steel Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Chicago until 1972, when he became the first faculty member at the College of the Atlantic in Bar Harbor, Maine.  His first book of poetry, The Hours of Morning (1980), won the Association of Writers & Writing Programs award, followed by Rain (1985) which won the S.F. Morse poetry prize.  The Wooden Nickel (Little-Brown, 2002) is a lobster-and- whale-oriented novel of which the New York Times said: “Melville would have approved.”  He sails with his family out of Castine, Maine.