Noel Polk1943

Major Works

• Walking Safari or, The Hippo Highway and Other Poems, January, 2012
• The Literary Manuscripts of Harold Frederic: A Catalogue. New York: Garland Pub., 1979.
• Faulkner's Requiem for a Nun: A Critical Study. Bloomington: Indiana  University Press, 1981.
• An Editorial Handbook for William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury. New York: Garland Pub., 1985.
• Turning Points  by John Ray Skates and Noel Polk. Jackson: Mississippi, Committee for the Humanities,1986.
• Eudora Welty: A Bibliography of Her Work. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1994.
• Children of the Dark House: Text and Context in Faulkner. Jackson: University Press of  Mississippi, 1996.
• Reading Faulkner. The Sound and the Fury. Glossary and commentary by Stephen M. Ross and Noel Polk. Jackson:  University Press of Mississippi, 1996.
• Outside the Southern Myth.  Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1997.

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Biography of Noel Polk

Noel Polk was born in Picayune, Mississippi, on February 23, 1943.  He received his B.A. in 1965 and his M.A.in 1966 from  Mississippi College.  In 1970 he earned his  Ph.D.from the University of South Carolina.  For twenty-seven years he was Professor of English at the University of Southern Mississippi and the editor of The Southern Quarterly. 

During the summer of 2004, Dr. Polk was the featured speaker at an international conference on William Faulkner, sponsored by the Japanese William Faulkner Society in Tokyo. He also taught a mini-seminar on "William Faulkner and Southern Culture" at Hokusei Gakuen University in Sapporo, Japan.

In the fall of 2004 Noel Polk joined the English Department at Mississippi State University and became the editor of  the Mississippi Quarterly, a scholarly journal of Southern culture, past and present, which is published by MSU's College of Arts and Sciences.  He now lives in Starkville, Mississippi. . He currently is in the process of editing Faulkner's works for three publishers: Library of America, Random House and Vintage International. Also, he recently edited a new edition of Robert Penn Warren's All the King's Men for Harcourt Brace and is also working on a new edition of William Cather's The Song of the Lark.

Polk was named a 2005 Fulbright Senior Scholar at the University of Lodz, Poland, where he lectured for five weeks on the works of famed Mississippi writers William Faulkner and Eudora Welty.  Polk's more than twenty-five book publications include Children of the Dark House: Text and Context in Faulkner (1996); Eudora Welty: A Bibliography of Her Work (1993); and Outside the Southern Myth (1997).

He is now Emeritus Professor of English at Mississippi State University and editor of the Mississippi Quarterly. He is best known for his editorial and critical work on William Faulkner and his critical work on Eudora Welty and has lectured widely on both in this country, Europe, Japan, Australia, and South America. His most recent work, Walking Safari or, The Hippo Highway and Other Poems, was published in January 2012 by the Texas Review Press and was the 2011 winner of TRP Southern Poetry Breakthrough Series: Mississippi. He is also a board member of Starkville Reads and a founding member of Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters.

"The poems in the first part of this book are set in and/or inspired by my walking safari in the South Luangwa Valley of Zambia in the summer of 2010. Some of the poems are whimsical responses to the guidebook, others taking serious the Mississippi-Africa axis in race relations. The title poem is a long meditation on that axis. Two poems are set in Lusaka, the capital city of Zambia, where friends took us to an AIDS compound (read: Ghetto) and another to an AIDS hospital. The “other poems” are poems I wrote many years ago and others that I started but recently finished; others are new poems, mostly set in and around my life in Mississippi."—Noel Polk

Photo above: Kathy Jacobs, author Noel Polk, Nancy Jacobs, author Howard Bahr, and Paul Jacobs on April 29, 2008.

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Related Websites

Mississippi State's page for Noel Polk, professor emeritus and editor of The Mississippi Quarterly.

Ole Miss Writers' page gives information about Noel Polk.

WHICH 'ALL THE KING'S MEN'? by Noel Polk, Reply by Joyce Carol Oates from The New York Times.

Children of the Dark House: Text and Context in Faulkner by Noel Polk are essays by a distinguished Faulkner editor and scholar. Polk's stature as a critic meshes neatly with his work as an editor; his patent joy at the very sight of Faulkner manuscripts is inspiriting, and his professed commitment to Freudian readings is expressed in sensible, jargon-free discourse that is both witty and brilliant says J. M. Ditsky, Choice. This link also links to other books by Polk printed by the University Press of Mississippi.

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