William Carpenter (writer)

William Carpenter (born October 31, 1940) is the author of three books of poetry, The Hours of Morning, Poems 1976–1979 (University Press of Virginia, 1981), Rain (Northeastern University Press, 1985), Speaking Fire at Stones (Tilbury House, 1992), and (to date) three novels, A Keeper of Sheep (Milkweed Editions, 1996), The Wooden Nickel (Little, Brown & Co., 2002), and Silence (Islandport Press, 2021).

Biography
Born and raised in New England, he earned his B.A. from Dartmouth and a Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota. He began publishing poetry in 1976, and won the Associated Writing Program's Contemporary Poetry Award in 1980. In 1985 he received the Samuel French Morse Prize and a National Endowment for the Arts grant. He moved to Maine in 1972 to help found the College of the Atlantic, a school dedicated to human ecology and the environment, where he served on the faculty for 48 years and retired in 2019.