Earnest Occupations

Richard Hague is a native Appalachian, born in Steubenville, Ohio, just across the river from Weirton, West Virginia. From his boyhood on, he visited and later summered occasionally in Monroe County, Ohio, on Greenbrier Ridge, Perry Township. He taught for forty-five years at an inner-city high school in Cincinnati, while also working now and then at Edgecliff College, Xavier University, Northeastern University, The Appalachian Writers Workshop in Hindman, Kentucky, Radford University�s Summer Highlander Institute in Appalachian Literature and Writing, and Thomas More College, where he began as Writer-in-Residence 2015. He has conducted workshops, lectures and readings in the East, Midwest, and Appalachia.

Winner of four Ohio Arts Council fellowships in poetry and creative nonfiction, he is a member of the Academy of American Poets, the Appalachian Studies Association, the Southern Appalachian Writers Cooperative, The Mercantile Library, The Literary Club of Cincinnati, and the Irish Heritage Center of Cincinnati.

His Milltown Natural: Essays and Stories from a Life (Bottom Dog Press) was a National Book Award nominee. For Ripening (Ohio State University Press) he was named co-Poet of the Year in Ohio in l985. Alive In Hard Country (Bottom Dog Press) was named 2003 Poetry Book of the Year by the Appalachian Writers Association, and During The Recent Extinctions: New & Selected Poems 1984-2012 (Dos Madres Press) won the Weatherford Award in Poetry. His latest collections are Beasts, River, Drunk Men, Garden, Burst, & Light: Sequences and Long Poems (Dos Madres Press, 2016) and Studied Days: Poems Early & Late in Appalachia (Dos Madres Press, 2017). He has also edited two anthologies for Dos Madres, Quarried: Three Decades of Pine Mt. Sand & Gravel (2015) and Realms of the Mothers: The First Decade of Dos Madres Press (2016) He continues to live in Cincinnati, and to operate Erie Gardens, a small urban organic farm.

He is married to Pamela Korte, Assistant Professor Emerita of Ceramics at Mt. St. Joseph University. They have two sons, Patrick and Brendan, both of Cincinnati.