Early years and education Haxton grew up in
Greenville, Mississippi, and graduated from Greenville High School in 1968. He then attended
Beloit College in Wisconsin, graduating with a BA in English literature and composition in 1972. He earned an M.A. in creative writing from Syracuse University in 1981. His parents, Kenneth Haxton (1919–2002) and Josephine Ayres Haxton (1921–2012), were both writers, although Kenneth Haxton was primarily known as a musician and composer. Josephine Haxton, a prominent southern fiction writer, used the pen name
Ellen Douglas.
Career Brooks Haxton has received awards, fellowships, and grants of support for original poetry, translation, and scriptwriting from the NEA, NEH,
Guggenheim Foundation, and other institutions. Haxton has taught poetry writing and literature courses for thirty years at several schools, including
Syracuse University,
Warren Wilson College, and
Sarah Lawrence College. He has taught creative writing at Syracuse University since 1993, and he has been a member of the Warren Wilson College faculty since 1990, teaching in the low-residency MFA program for writers. His poems have appeared in numerous magazines and journals, including the
Paris Review,
The Atlantic Monthly,
The New Yorker, the
Kenyon Review,
Poetry, and
Beloit Poetry Journal. On November 14, 1990, Haxton was one of nine members of the eleven-member literary panel of the National Endowment for the Arts who resigned to protest an alleged attempt by Congress to restrict freedom of artistic expression in the endowment's 1991 budget. The resigning members viewed Congress's restriction of awards based on "general standards of decency" as a curb on freedom of speech. Haxton was the screenwriter for the documentary film "Tennessee Williams: Orpheus of the American Stage" (1994), which appeared in the
PBS series
American Masters, season 9, episode 2. In 2011 Haxton presented the Winslow Lecture at
Hamilton College under the title “Candor and Wisdom: the Poetry of Early Classical Greece.” In 2013, he received the Hanes Award for Poetry from the
Fellowship of Southern Writers, an organization that recognizes and encourages excellence in Southern literature.
Personal life Haxton lives in Syracuse, New York, with his wife, Frances Haxton. They married on June 5, 1983. They have one son and twin daughters. ==Bibliography==