Jo McDougall, a native of DeWitt, Arkansas, currently lives in Little Rock. She is the author of three books of poetry: Towns Facing Railroads (199 1), From Darkening Porches (1996), University of Arkansas Press; and The Woman in the Next Booth (1987), BkMk Press, University of Missouri at Kansas City. A paperback edition of The Woman in the Next Booth was released this spring by BkMk Press. McDougall! s fourth poetry collection, Sleeping With the Light On, is ready for publication. She is the recipient of a DeWitt Wallace/Reader's Digest Award, a John Gould Fletcher Award, a John Ciardi Fellowship in Poetry, and three fellowships to the MacDowell Colony.

Her poems have appeared in numerous journals including the Kenyon Review, The Hudson Review, The New Orleans Review, New Letters, The Midwest Quarterly, Poetry East, and Controlled Burn. Her work has been widely anthologized, appearing most recently in The Made Thing. An Anthology of Contemporary Southern Poetry, 2d Edition; and Arkansas, Arkansas: Writers and Writingsftom the Delta to the Ozarks, 1970-Present. Her poems have been adapted for theater, and a fihn based on her dramatic monologues is currently in production. Her poems are currently on file in a collaborative project with printmaker Ann deVere at the Bronx Museum of Modem Art.

A prose writer as well as a poet, McDougall has published a monograph, Boots and Recognition: Where Poetry Comes From. Her prose has appeared in Paragraph and The Arkansas Times and has been anthologized in Somewhere Apart, University of Arkansas Press, 1997.

An Associate Professor Emeritus in English, McDougall was for ten years the director of the Distinguished Visiting Writers Series and co‑director of the Creative Writing Program, Pittsburg State University, Pittsburg, Kansas. She has taught at Northeastern Louisiana University, University of Arkansas at Fayetteville, University of Arkansas at Little Rock, and Hendrix College. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Arkansas.