Fred Chappell is the author of over twenty volumes of poetry, novels, short stories, and essays. His first book of poems, The World Between the Eyes, was published in 1971, by which time Chappell had already published three novels. Chappell has been awarded a Woodrow Wilson fellowship, a Rockefeller Grant, the Award in Literature from the National Institute of Arts and Letters, the Best Foreign Novel Prize from the French Academy for his novel Dagon, the World Fantasy Award for best short story, and the T.S. Eliot Award for Creative Writing from the Ingersoll Foundation. In 1997 he was named Poet Laureate of North Carolina. Chappell died at the age of eighty-seven on January 4, 2024.