She is the Robert W. Woodruff Professor of English and Creative Writing at Emory University in Atlanta. In addition to a second one-year term as Poet Laureate of the United States, she is also serving a four-year term as the poet laureate of the state of Mississippi.
Since 1995 she has been the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Professor of Social and Political Ethics at the University of Chicago Divinity School. She will spend five months in Washington conducting research for her book on America in the 1950s.
