I’m pleased to welcome occasional contributor Brandon Wicks back to Art & Literature once more. This week, Wicks interviews William Wright, an award-winning poet now working on what’s shaping up to be one of the most ambitious projects in contemporary Southern letters. Wicks handles the official introduction and takes the post from here.
William Wright is the series editor of The Southern Poetry Anthology, a multi-volume collection of contemporary southern poetry. Volumes I and II, South Carolina and Mississippi, were co-edited with the late Stephen Gardner. The third, Contemporary Appalachia, co-edited with Jesse Graves and Paul Ruffin, is forthcoming in Spring 2011. Wright is the author of a chapbook, The Ghost Narratives, and a full-length poetry collection, Dark Orchard, which was the 2005 winner of the Texas Review Breakthrough Poetry Prize.
Brandon Wicks: You’re now at work finishing up the third volume of the Southern Poetry Anthology. It would seem a daunting process for any writer to transition into editing such an ambitious project. How did this idea take shape? How did it gain traction?
To be frank, the idea for The Southern Poetry Anthology took shape due to supreme naïveté on my part, and it was sheer luck that the idea was acted upon. I own only a few anthologies dedicated specifically to poetry of the American South, because only a few exist—Leon Stokesbury’s The Made Thing, the beautiful second edition that came out of the University of Arkansas in 1999; 45/96: The Ninety-Six Sampler of South Carolina Poetry (Ninety-Six Press), edited by Gilbert Allen; The Yellow Shoe Poets, 1964-1999: Selected Poems (LSU Press), edited by George Garrett; Locales (LSU Press), a collection edited by Fred Chappell; and Invited Guest: An Anthology of Twentieth-Century Southern Poetry (University Press of Virginia), edited by David Rigsbee and Steven Ford Brown. (There are certainly more regional anthologies, but I haven’t gotten a hold of them yet.) I found all of these anthologies to be wonderful for me—formative influences for my own work that lead me to discover these voices more deeply in the author-specific Selected Poems and Collected Poems editions, not to mention stand-alone books. But these works never seemed to dig deeply enough. I knew—thanks mostly to Stephen Gardner and a few other mentors—that lots of great poetry being written in the southern states was relatively unsung, visible only in a few journals here or there, perhaps in a chapbook or two.
In 2003, I first started thinking this way, and so, inconveniently—among teaching, term papers, presentations, and my own writing—The Question arose: Why don’t I edit a series of books—state-by-state with a few regions considered, too, and take a contemporary snapshot of poetry in the American South as it is in the present moment? How presumptuous!
Two other authors are also making the rounds. George Bishop, a graduate of the MFA program at UNC-Wilmington and now a resident of New Orleans, has written a debut novel that’s already earning high marks. The Wilmington Star-News ran 
First up, mystery maven 
