About The Author
Richard Shelton is the author of nine books of
poetry including The Bus to Veracruz (1978) and Selected Poems: 1969-1981 (1982). His poems and
prose pieces have appeared in more than two
hundred magazines and journals including The
New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Paris Review, and The Antioch Review. They have been translated
into Spanish, French, Swedish, Polish, and Japanese.
In 1974, Shelton established, under the auspices of the Arizona Commission on the Arts, a writer’s workshop at the Arizona State Prison. Many books of prose and poetry by men in that workshop and Shelton’s subsequent prison workshops have been published. Shelton is currently directing three prison writer’s workshops in three units of the Arizona State Prison Complex near Tucson. For the past 13 years these workshops have been supported by the Lannan Foundation. A book about his experiences teaching creative writing to inmates in the Arizona prison system will be published in 2007 by the University of Arizona Press.
Shelton has lived in Southern Arizona since 1956 and is Regents Professor of English at the University of Arizona. Going Back to Bisbee was his first major book of nonfiction.