Born and raised in the rural Appalachian region of western North Carolina, Robert Morgan is not only one of the most talented and distinct spokesmen for that particular area, its people, and its culture but also one of the most prolific, technically accomplished, and consistently interesting poets in contemporary American writing. He is a regionalist in the widest sense of the term, drawing, as many writers have done, on the specific culture and energies of his region as an alternative response both to the breakdown of traditional social, religious, and moral systems in Western culture and to the various solutions to that breakdown that poets and writers have proposed.

Morgan was born on 3 October 1944 in Hendersonville, North Carolina, to Clyde R. (a farmer) and Fannie Levi Morgan. He earned his B.A. in English from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1965 and his M.F...