Cleopatra Mathis

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Cleopatra Mathis (born 1947, Ruston, Louisiana) is an American poet who since 1982 has been the Frederick Sessions Beebe Professor in the English department at Dartmouth College, where she is also director of the Creative Writing Program. She is the author of several books of poetry including What to Tip the Boatman? (Sheep Meadow Press, 2001) and White Sea (Sarabande, 2005).

Mathis is of Greek and Cherokee descent. Her first five books of poems were published by Sheep Meadow Press, and are distributed by University Press of New England. What to Tip the Boatman? won the Jane Kenyon Award for Outstanding Book of Poems in 2001. A new collection of poems, White Sea, was published by Sarabande Books in 2005. Cleopatra Mathis' work has appeared widely in anthologies, textbooks, magazines and journals, including The New Yorker, Poetry, American Poetry Review, Tri-Quarterly, The Southern Review, The Georgia Review, The Made Thing: An Anthology of Contemporary Southern Poetry, The Extraordinary Tide: Poetry by American Women, and The Practice of Poetry. Various prizes for her work include two National Endowment for the Arts grants, in 1984 and 2003; the Peter Lavin Award for Younger Poets from the Academy of American Poets; two Pushcart Prizes, 1980 and 2006; The Robert Frost Resident Poet Award; a 1981-82 Fellowship in Poetry at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts; The May Sarton Award; and Individual Artist Fellowships in Poetry from both the New Hampshire State Council on the Arts and the New Jersey State Arts Council.

Cleopatra Mathis lives with her family in Hanover, New Hampshire.