College of Charleston English professor Carol Ann Davis’ second book, Atlas Hour, will be released by Tupelo Press on August 31, 2011.  The book, a collection of poem-maps, sifts and selects moments in history and in the annals of art, bringing the stuff of every day into relationship with the great mysteries of existence: what we believe, who we love, whom and what we choose to hurt or leave unharmed.

David Wojahn, a major contemporary American poet, says, “What we admire in Carol Ann Davis’s new collection is akin to what we admire in Dickinson–a quality of ardor as the poet struggles toward grace, a grace that is sought in both the domestic and in the ineffable.”

Atlas Hour embraces the works and lives of the painters Vermeer and Mark Rothko, Fra Angelico and Gerhard Richter, the anonymous child-artists of the Nazis’ Terezin transit camp and the poet’s own children.

Davis also has new poems forthcoming in Agni, The American Poetry Review, and Denver Quarterly.  Her first book, Psalm (Tupelo Press, 2007), was runner up for the Dorset Prize, a national competition of more than 1,200 manuscripts. Davis is also the recipient of a 2007 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship in Poetry.

Carol Ann Davis has been a professor in the English department at the College of Charleston since 2000. She teaches courses in poetry writing at all levels and in literary publishing, with occasional forays into the teaching of contemporary poetry. She co-edits the literary journal Crazyhorse and directs the creative writing concentration within the English major. Before coming to the College, she taught at Randolph-Macon Woman’s College, Stonehill College, and Endicott College.

Carol Ann Davis can be reached at 843.953.7269 or davisca@cofc.edu.