ANN DEAGON

(January 19, 1930–)

The daughter of Robert and Alice Webb Fleming, Ann Deagon was born in Birmingham, Alabama. She earned her B.A. from Birmingham-Southern College in 1950 and her doctorate in classical studies from the University of North Carolina in 1954. In 1951 she married Donald Deagon and is now the mother of two daughters.

After beginning her career as a classics professor at Furman University in Greenville, South Carolina, she joined the faculty at Guilford College in Greensboro, North Carolina, in 1956 and served as Professor of Humanities and Writer-in-Residence there until her retirement in 1992.

Beginning her writing career in 1970, Deagon worked actively with regional and national writers’ groups and in 1980 founded Poetry Center Southeast, a forerunner of the North Carolina Writers’ Network. She was editor of The Guilford Review from 1976 until 1984, and in 1981, received a National Endowment for the Arts Literary Fellowship.

She and her husband spent a dozen summers during the 1950s and early 1960s on the Qualla Reservation in Cherokee, North Carolina, working on Unto These Hills, an outdoor drama about the forced removal of the Cherokee to Oklahoma over the infamous Trail of Tears. She wrote her first book-length poem, Indian Summer, to honor Jonah Feather and to pay tribute to “the humane vigor of the Cherokee people as well as to the humor and stubborn dignity of one man.”

OTHER SOURCES TO EXPLORE

PRIMARY

Novel: The Diver's Tomb (1984). Poetry: The Polo Poems (1990), There is No Balm in Birmingham (1978), Women and Children First (1976), Indian Summer (1975), Poetics South (1974), Carbon 14 (1974). Short stories: Habitats (1982).

SECONDARY

Contemporary Authors, Vols. 57–60, 161–62. James F. Mersmann, “Erotic Hyphens: Ann Deagon's Centers That Hold,” Poets in the South 1:1, 72–83. A. McA. Miller, “Conversation with Ann Deagon,” Poets in the South 1:1 (1977), 67–71.