Stephen E. Meats

Stephen E. Meats served as Professor of English at Pittsburg State University from 1979 until his retirement as Chairperson/Professor Emeritus in 2014, where he also served at various times as Chair of the English Department and Interim Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences. From 1968-1972 he taught at the United States Air Force Academy, and from 1972-1979, at the University of Tampa, where he also served as Chair of the Humanities Division. His areas of specialty are 19th century and modern American literature, and scholarly and creative editing. His dissertation was an edition of the correspondence of the British expatriate sporting writer Henry William Herbert (aka “Frank Forester”). He has published articles on Herbert, 19th century American humor, scholarly editing, William Gilmore Simms, and Faulkner, and has edited (with A. Keen Butterworth) Simms’s novel, Joscelyn (U of South Carolina Press, 1975); (with James B. Meriwether) The Revolutionary War Novels of William Gilmore Simms (8 vols., Reprint Company, 1976); (with Edwin T. Arnold) The Writings of Benjamin Franklin Perry (3 vols., Reprint Company, 1980); and most recently, Simms’s novel, The Partisan (U of Arkansas Press, 2011). His poetry and short fiction have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, and he is the author of one book of poetry, Looking for the Pale Eagle (1993; second edition, 2014) one mixed genre volume of poems and stories, Dark Dove Descending and Other Parables (2013), and a chapbook-length prose poem, Treehouse (2016). He served as poetry editor of The Midwest Quarterly from 1985-2015. In 2016, the Editorial Board of MQ established the Stephen Meats Poetry Prize which is awarded annually in his honor.