John Haines


John Meade Haines was an American poet and educator who had served as the poet laureate of Alaska.

Early life

Haines was born in Norfolk, Virginia. He later moved to Washington, DC where he attended St. John's College High School, the National Art School, and American University. From 1950 to 1952 he studied at Hans Hoffman's School of Fine Arts in New York before moving to Alaska where he homesteaded from 1954 to 1969.

Career

Haines published nine collections of poetry and numerous works of nonfiction, including his acclaimed Alaskan book The Stars, the Snow, the Fire: Twenty-Five Years in the Alaska Wilderness. Haines was twice the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship. He was appointed the Poet Laureate of Alaska in 1969. A collection of critical essays about his poetry, The Wilderness of Vision, was published in 1998. Haines taught graduate level and honors English classes at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. He died in Fairbanks, Alaska.
Tributes to John Haines by the author and literary critic John A. Murray were published in The Bloomsbury Review, July–August 2011 and The Sewanee Review, Winter 2012. Murray also conducted a lengthy interview with John Haines in The Bloomsbury Review, July–August 2004. There are lengthy discussions of John Haines in Murray's book Abbey in America: A Philosopher's Legacy in a New Century in the essay 'The Age of Abbey' and in the Afterword.

Anthologies