photo: François Camoin

Judy Jordan grew up on a small farm near the border between the Carolinas. Her parents were sharecroppers, and Jordan was the first member of her family to attend college, receiving a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Virginia in 1990. In 1995 she went on to earn a Master of Fine Arts degree in poetry at the same school. She has taught at the University of Virginia and Piedmont Virginia Community College, and in 1996 she received a Virginia Commission for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry. Her first poetry collection, Carolina Ghost Woods (Louisiana State University Press, 2000), was selected by James Tate to receive the 1999 Walt Whitman Award and won the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her poems have appeared in Blue Pitcher Review, Crossroads: A Journal of Southern Culture, Lucid Oona, Poetry, Western Humanities Review, and Writer’s Eye. In addition to Carolina Ghost Woods, Jordan has completed two novels and is currently at work on a full-length play, a memoir, and a book-length poem. She lives in Salt Lake City, where she recently earned a Master of Fine Arts degree in fiction from the University of Utah.