William Carpenter
207-801-5704  |  carpentr@coa.edu  |  faculty website

Bill Carpenter, full-time faculty member in Literature and Writing, grew up in central Maine, graduated from Waterville High, got a B.A. from Dartmouth and a Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota, where he held the University Doctoral Fellowship. He was Assistant Professor of English & Humanities and Inland Steel Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Chicago until 1972, when he saw the startup announcement from College of the Atlantic and decided to change his life. He became the first faculty member at COA and has been teaching here ever since with a short stint as faculty dean in the eighties. His first book of poetry, The Hours of Morning (1980), won the AWP award, followed by Rain (1985) which won the S.F. Morse award, and a collaboration with the artist Robert Shetterley, Speaking Fire at Stones. His novel A Keeper of Sheep was nominated for the ALA gay/lesbian award in 1995. The Wooden Nickel (Little-Brown 2002) is a lobster- and whale-oriented novel of which the New York Times said, "Melville would have approved." His work is widely represented in periodicals and anthologies, including The Maine Poets (2003). His intellectual interests are in modernism and psychoanalysis; his literary and teaching styles tend toward comic exaggeration. He has been an NEA Fellow and a Fellow of the Society for Human Ecology. His escapes from the written word are mainly aboard the 30-foot sloop "Northern Light," which he sails with his family out of Castine, Maine.

B.A. Dartmouth College, 1962
Ph.D. English, University of Minnesota, 1967

Courses Taught

Autobiography
Bread, Love, and Dreams
Poetry and the American Environment
The Aesthetics of Violence
Starting Your Novel
Creative Writing
Tutorial: Advanced Fiction
Tutorial: Continuing Your Novel II
Shakespeare: Character, Conflict, and Cinematography
Shakespeare: Character, Conflict, and Cinematography - WF
Tutorial: Advanced Narrative
Tutorial: Advanced Studies in Jung
The Eye and the Poet