Judy Jordan’s first book of poetry, Carolina Ghost Woods, won the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Academy of American Poets Walt Whitman Award, the Thomas Wolfe Literary Award, the Oscar Arnold Young Book Prize of the Poetry Council of North Carolina, and the Utah Book of the Year Award for Poetry. A book-length poem, 60 Cent Coffee and a Quarter to Dance, was released in 2005 by Louisiana State UP. Her third manuscript, Hunger, which centers around two years of semi-homelessness during which she lived in a half-collapsed greenhouse is with Louisiana State UP. A vegan, Jordan currently lives off-grid, surrounded by the Shawnee National Forest in a Thoreau-size cordwood cabin she built herself and is completing an eco-friendly, passive solar heated, hybrid earthbag and cob house. She is nearing completion of a fourth book of poetry and is working on a memoir and a work of non-fiction concerning global climate change. She is a professor of poetry at Southern Illinois University Carbondale.
