James Seay

James Seay

The author of four books of poetry, James Seay was born January 1, 1939, in Panola County, Mississippi. He received a bachelor of arts degree from the University of Mississippi in 1964, and followed it two years later with a M.A. degree from the University of Virginia. He has taught English at a number of colleges and universities, including Virginia Military Institute, the University of Alabama, and Vanderbilt University. Since 1974 he has taught creative writing at the University of North Carolina at 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 a documentary film about big-game hunting in East Africa, In the Blood (1990), with the film's director, George Butler. He has received several awards for his work, including an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1988.

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 of talismanic significance.... Acknowledging the totems and detritus of village life — mobile homes on concrete blocks, rotgut whiskey in Clorox bottles, Kotex boxes used by children to trap starlings, abandoned cars — Seay tends to invest such phenomena with mysterious potentiality that transforms them into the stuff of legend" (547).

(Article first posted October 1998)