Mississippi born Jim Seay teaches poetry in the English and Comparative Literature Department at UNC Chapel Hill.  Seay’s books of poetry include Let Not Your Hart (1970), Water Tables (1974), The Light as They Found It (1990), and most recently, Open Field, Understory (1997), a collection of new and selected poems. In addition he co-wrote the  documentary film In the Blood about big game hunting in Africa with director George Butler, of Pumping Iron fame.  His poetry has been selected for inclusion in some thirty anthologies.  He has also published essays in general-interest magazines such as Esquire and in literary journals such as Antaeus. From 1987-1997 he served as director of the Creative Writing Program at UNC-CH.  His honors include an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a Bowman and Gordon Gray Professorship (1996-1999) for excellence in undergraduate teaching.

In an article in Louis D. Rubin’s The History of Southern Literature, James H. Justus says that no other Southern poet of Seay’s generation has done better than Seay “in not only evoking the village culture of the contemporary South but also transforming its commonplaces into objects and events . . .  into the stuff of legend” (547).

(Article first posted October 1998)

“Comic, sad, reflective, exuberant, Open Field, Understory glows with the worn, unselfconscious beauty of broken-in leather. This is a marvelous book by an important modern poet. “