Among Clarence Major's previous sixteen poetry collections are Swallow the Lake (a National Council on the Arts winner), Configurations: New and Selected Poems (a National Book Award Bronze Medal winner), and Sporadic Troubleshooting (2022). He has contributed poetry to the New Yorker, Harvard Review, American Scholar, American Poetry Review, Best American Poetry, Literary Review, Ploughshares, and dozens of other periodicals. A Fulbright scholar, among Major's other awards are a Western States Book Award, a Lifetime Achievement Award for Excellence in the Fine Arts from the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation, and a PEN Oakland/Reginald Lockett Lifetime Achievement Award for Excellence in Literature. He was elected to the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame in 2021. Major is a distinguished professor emeritus of twentieth-century American literature at the University of California, Davis.