Jo McDougall is a poet of the Arkansas Delta. Her work is noted for its sparseness and evocation of small-town life. Her poems are subtle portraits of the lives of rural families, farmers, housewives, and the struggles and tragedies they face. She has won many prizes for her work, which has been published in books, magazines, and anthologies. In 2018, she was named Poet Laureate of Arkansas. McDougall has written six poetry collections: The Woman in the Next Booth (1987), Towns Facing Railroads (1991), From Darkening Porches (1996), Dirt (2001), Satisfied With Havoc (2004), and The Undiscovered Room (2016). She also published a chapbook titled Women Who Marry Houses (1983). University of Arkansas Press published a compilation of McDougall’s poetry, In the Home of the Famous Dead: Collected Poems, in 2015. McDougall has been awarded a fellowship from the Arkansas Arts Council and received the Porter Prize in 2000. She has received several fellowships to MacDowell and has won the DeWitt Wallace/Reader’s Digest Writing Award. Her work has been published in many journals and newspapers, including Arkansas Review: A Journal of Delta Studies, The Kenyon Review, The Hudson Review, The Georgia Review, North American Review, the Arkansas Times, and the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, and in several anthologies including Good Poems for Hard Times, edited by Garrison Keillor. She was inducted into the Arkansas Writers Hall of Fame in 2006.
McDougall received the Porter Prize Fund Lifetime Achievement Award in Literature in 2019, and won a Pushcart Prize and will be included in the anthology, Pushcart Prize XLV: Best of the Small Presses in 2020.
