Alice Fulton (born 1952) is an American author of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. Fulton is the Ann S. Bowers Professor of English Emerita at Cornell University. Her awards include the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature, Library of Congress Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Award, and Ingram Merrill Foundation Award, as well as the MacArthur Fellowship. Biography Fulton was born and raised in Troy, New York, the youngest of three daughters. Her father was the proprietor of the historic Phoenix Hotel, and her mother was a visiting nurse. She began writing poetry in high school. In 1979 she attended a women's poetry conference in Amherst, Mass., which she would later cite as a formative experience. While an undergraduate, she received competitive scholarships to study poetry with Thomas Lux at The Writers Community in New York City. In 1980 she married Hank De Leo and moved to Ithaca, New York, to study poetry under A. R. Ammons, Phyllis Janowitz, Kenneth McClane, and Robert Morgan in Cornell University's Creative Writing Program. While at Cornell, her first book was selected by W. D. Snodgrass for the Associated Writing Program's publication prize. After receiving her MFA, she was a fellow at The Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. In 1983 Fulton moved to the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, Michigan, for a three-year appointment as Fellow in the Michigan Society of Fellows. Mark Strand selected Fulton's second book, Palladium, for publication in the 1985 National Poetry Series. In the interdisciplinary Society of Fellows she further developed her interest in using scientific metaphor and began her lifelong friendship with John H. Holland. She has often cited Holland's writing on Complex Adaptive Systems as being instrumental in the development of her theory on Fractal Poetics [see Fulton's prose collection]. It was also where she met the composers William Bolcom and Enid Sutherland. In 1991 Fulton was awarded a MacArthur "Genius Grant" Fellowship. In addition to poetry, Fulton has written essays and criticism and has been widely praised for her finely crafted and emotionally powerful short fiction. The Nightingales of Troy collects the ten stories she had published before 2008. Two of those stories were selected for inclusion in The Best American Short Stories. Three contemporary authors share the distinction of appearing in both The Best American Short Stories and The Best American Poetry series: Alice Fulton, Lydia Davis, and Stuart Dybek. Alice Fulton