Honorary Member Citation
B. H. (Pete) Fairchild was born in Houston, Texas and grew up there and also in small towns in west Texas, Oklahoma, and southwest Kansas. He attended the University of Kansas receiving his BA degree in 1964. While at Kansas, he worked part-time as movie usher, technical writer for a nitroglycerin plant, and English tutor to the University basketball team. From Kansas, he came to the University of Tulsa where he received a PhD in English. He has taught at California State University in San Bernadino and currently is a member of the English Department at Texas Christian University in Fort Worth, Texas. In addition to his work in academia, Professor Fairchild is a nationally renowned poet. His poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Paris Review, Hudson Review, Southern Review, Poetry, Yale Review, Sewanee Review, and many other journals and anthologies including The Best American Poems of 2000. He has been the recipient of fellowships and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Lannan Foundation. In 2001, the American Academy of Arts and Letters awarded him the Arthur Rense Poetry Prize for “consistent excellence over a long career.”
Professor Fairchild’s first full-length book was The Arrival of the Future, originally published by Swallow’s Tale Press in 1985 and republished in a new edition by Alice James Books in 2000. His third book, The Art of the Lathe, was a Finalist for the National Book Award and also received the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, the William Carlos Williams Award, the PEN West Poetry Award, the California Book Award, the Natalie Ornish Award from the Texas Institute of Letters, and an Honorable Mention for the Poet’s Prize. He is also the author of Such Holy Song, a scholarly study of the poet William Blake. Fairchild’s fourth book of poems, Early Occult Memory Systems of the Lower Midwest, appeared from W. W. Norton in 2003 and received the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Gold Medal in Poetry from the California Book Awards, the Texas Institute of Letters Poetry Award, and the Bobbitt Award from the Library of Congress which is given in behalf of the nation for “the most distinguished book of poems published in the previous two years.” In 2005, a revised edition of his second book, Local Knowledge, was published by Norton and Fairchild was honored with the Aiken/Taylor Modern Poetry Award from The Sewanee Review for his body of work. A limited-edition fine press book, Trilogy, will be appearing from PennyRoyal Press in 2008, will illustrations by Barry Moser, and an additional forthcoming book Usher will be published by Norton in 2009.
We welcome Professor Fairchild back to the University of Tulsa. His initiation into Phi Beta Kappa celebrates his teaching, scholarship, and the profound corpus of poems that he has written for us all.