Faulkner Fox grew up in West Point, Virginia,
a Tidewater mill town of 2500. As a child she read a lot, loved
the ocean, and occasionally pretended to be part of the Partridge
Family.
In 1981, she went to Harvard University where she studied French
and American literature and worked as a peer contraceptive counselor.
After graduation, she moved to Richmond, Virginia, and worked
in state government researching housing and treatment for the
chronically mentally ill. When she won a small grant from Radcliffe
College to study women's alternative spiritual practices, she
moved to New Orleans. There she worked as an English tutor, a
high school French teacher, and a tour guide at The Voodoo Museum.
In 1988, Faulkner entered the Ph.D. program in American Studies
at Yale. While living in New Haven, she taught Upward Bound
to high school students in New Haven, Waterbury, and Bridgeport.
In 1992, she left Yale to work as the director of NARAL-NC. Two years later, she
got married and moved to Austin, Texas. Her first son was born
in November.
Faulkner got an M.F.A. in poetry from Vermont College in 1997
and began teaching poetry workshops at the University of Texas
at Austin. Her second son was born in August. She grew appalled
by the number of executions in Texas and joined the anti-death
penalty movement, writing articles about racism
and capital
punishment.
In 1998, two of Faulkner's poems won Prairie
Schooner's Bernice Slote Award
for the best work by an emerging writer. She began reading in
Austin's vibrant poetry scene, performing two extended pieces
at the Frontera Fest, an international fringe theater event. One
of these pieces, "Sex Talkin' Mama," traveled to venues in the
United States and Canada and was frequently broadcast (late at
night) on public TV across Texas. Faulkner also began to write
prose
about motherhood and domestic
life.
In 2002, Faulkner and her family moved back to Durham, North Carolina,
where she teaches creative writing at Duke and volunteers with
NARAL Pro-Choice North Carolina. Dispatches
from a Not-So-Perfect Life is her first book.
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