About Chapman Hood Frazier
CHAPMAN HOOD FRAZIER was born on September 30, 1951 in Clarksburg, West Virginia, grew up in central West Virginia and the Ohio Valley where he attended Parkersburg High School. In high school, he and friends started the Students for Democratic Action, (SDA) a liberal-radical organization based on principles adapted from the Students for a Democratic Society. It hosted discussions on current issues, organized anti-war protests in high school, and published an underground newspaper, the MOLE (Movement of Liberal Equality) for which Frazier first began writing poetry.
Later, he attended West Virginia University, majored in English and creative writing Poetry, and was active in the Mountaineer Freedom Party. After graduation in 1973, he continued in the MA English program completing a creative thesis, How to Make Magic: Writing Poetry from Dreams under the direction of poet and professor, Winston Fuller who introduced him to contemporary poetry. At WVU, Frazier won a student poetry prize for his poem, Acidic Purification, and was asked to read it on WVU-TV. Also, he published two early poems in the West Virginia Law Review. While at WVU, he met other writers and traveled with them to the Library of Congress in Washington DC to attend readings by Robert Bly and Stanley Kunitz. There they met with Bly, who provided them with commentary on their poems.
He married artist Deborah Carrington in 1975 and moved to Southside Virginia where he taught at Southside Virginia Community College (SVCC) and they raised their two children, Dylan and Caitlin. There he met poets, Tom O’Grady, Quinten Vest, and Dan Corrie, and was invited to guest edit an issue of The Hampden-Sydney Poetry Review. At Hampden-Sydney, he was introduced to a variety of influential writers including Denise Levertov, Seamus Heaney, Kurt Vonnegut, David Ignato, Louis Simpson and others. He began publishing work in several small press publications and under an Inmate Education Grant, taught two SVCC courses at Buckingham Correctional Institution where he invited scholars and poets to the facility to read and discuss poetry with inmates.
After completing an M.S. in Reading from Longwood College, he went on to earn a doctorate in English Education from the University of Virginia. There he also studied with Gregory Orr and Michael Ryan, and co-directed the Young Writer’s Workshop. During this time, he taught classes at Murray High School, an innovative, Glasser-based public high school in Charlottesville, VA. His wife, Deborah, while working on her PhD in Education at UVA, became a teacher at the Waldorf school and both children attended there. Frazier became interested in how the arts were integrated into the curriculum and the central role of the imagination in Waldorf education and decided to write his dissertation on how students transitioned from an artistically, rich environment to public schools. So, he became chairman of the Crossroads Waldorf School Board and completed his dissertation, Leaving the Garden: A Case Study of Student Transition from Waldorf to Public Schools.
While at the Waldorf School, he collaborated with musician Bobby Read, a future member of the Bruce Hornsby Band and his then wife, Denise Read a modern dancer, on a creative collaboration of his poem, “The Wrinkle.” He went on to win several awards for ekphrastic poetry in the University of Virginia’s Bayly Art Museum’s annual poetry contest and his work was published in the museum’s journal, The Writer’s Eye.
After graduation from UVA, he and Deborah accepted positions at the University of Maine Presque Isle. There he initiated The Voices in the North Country Conference for writers and local indigenous storytellers from the Micmac, Maliseet and Acadian cultures.
After three years, the family returned to central Virginia, where he and Deborah taught at Longwood University, and he was a poetry co-editor for the Dos Passos Review. During that time, he began interviewing contemporary poets: Tim Seibles, Ted Kooser, Nikki Giovanni, Gregory Orr, and the late Claudia Emerson. While at Longwood he founded “The Poetry Hit Squad,” a student group who experimented with innovative methods of teaching poetry in middle and high school.
In 2012, Frazier and Carrington moved to Harrisonburg, VA to teach at James Madison University. While there, they initiated the first teacher education practicum in Northern Ireland. While there, Frazier continued to interview contemporary poets, Rita Dove, and Bob Hicok, and Northern Irish poets, Medbh McGuckian and Sinéad Morrissey. His interviews with Nikki Giovanni and Rita Dove appeared in The Writer’s Chronicle and the inaugural issue of Agni Online. In addition, an interview with Ted Kooser was reprinted in Poetry Criticism: Excerpts from Criticism of the Works of the Most Significant and Widely Studied Poetry of World Literature. Also, at JMU, he collaborated with the poet and director of The Furious Flower African American Poetry Center, Joanne Gabbin, teaching in her poetry camp for children and participating in The Furious Flower Poetry Center’s yearly Conference where he interviewed the poet, Sonia Sanchez. This interview is due out by the Writer’s Chronicle in the fall of 2022.
Recently, he has won several awards from The Poetry Society of Virginia including the prestigious, Edgar Allen Poe Award and Sarah Lockwood Prize. His chapbook, The Books of the Bestiary: A Chapbook was runner up for the Alexandria Quarterly Poetry Chapbook Competition and his poem “Rifling Through the Ruins” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2019. His collection The Lost Books of the Bestiary was runner-up for the V Press LC Poetry Award and was published in February of 2023. The title poem, “Bestiary” appeared in the 2021, 58:2 issue of The Southern Poetry Review.
Recently, he was Co-Director of the Sunrise Learning Center, an early education initiative that he co-founded with Deborah Carrington. This program provided an innovative, holistic early education opportunity for children in southside Virginia. Frazier currently is completing a collection of interviews with poets, and an additional book of poetry, The Luminous Orders of Being. Some of these poems have been published in The Triggerfish Critical Review, The Hampden Sydney Poetry Review and are in submission to other journals. Also, as a Professor in Residence for JMU, he works with teachers and students in Prince Edward County Schools and teaches graduate classes for Longwood University and is Co-Owner of Bell Field Farm, LLC.
The Lost Books of the Bestiary is available through Barnes and Noble Bookstores for $24.99, Amazon, or Independent Bookstores like the New Dominion Bookshop in Charlottesville, VA, www.ndbookshop.com. Publisher: V Press LC, ISBN 979-8-9854670-6-2