John Engels

Born in South Bend, Indiana, in 1931, John Engels (1931 – 2007) attended the University of Notre Dame, graduating in 1952 with an AB in English. After three years in the Navy, he went on to University College, Dublin, where he studied Anglo-Irish Literature, and then to the Iowa Writers’ Workshops, from which he graduated with an M.F.A. in 1957. After five years at St. Norbert College in West DePere, Wisconsin, he joined the English faculty at St. Michael’s College in Colchester, Vermont, where he taught from 1962 on. He was a lecturer at Sweet Briar College, Randolph-Macon Woman’s College, Middlebury College, and Emory University, as well as at the University of Alabama. In 1995 he was Wyndham Robertson Chair in Creative Writing, at Hollins College. In collaboration with David Huddle, he conducted the Spring Writing Workshop at the University of Vermont. He was Frost Fellow at Bread Loaf Writers Conference in 1976, and has received two National Endowment for the Arts grants, a Guggenheim Fellowship (1980), a Fulbright Fellowship (Yugoslavia, 1985), as well as a Rockefeller Foundation residency at Bellagio in 1991. In 1997 he received a National YMCA Residency Fellowship. He was resident poet at the Frost Place in 1988, and later Frost Place Fellow at Annaghmakerrig, in Ireland. Weather-Fear (University of Georgia Press) was a Pulitzer finalist in 1983, and Cardinals in the Ice Age (Graywolf Press) a National Poetry Series selection in 1987.