Leon STOKESBURY

STOKESBURY, Leon Michael Leon Stokesbury, 72, of Tucker, Georgia, passed away November 13, 2018. He was born in Oklahoma City, OK, but grew up in southeast Texas. Leon recently retired from Georgia State University, where he taught in the creative writing department for 30 years. He is survived by his wife of 38 years, Susan Thurman, and their daughter Erin Stokesbury, of Littleton, NH. Leon graduated from the University of Arkansas with an MFA in poetry, and earned his Ph.D. in creative writing at Florida State University. Author and editor of several poetry collections, he received the Distinguished Georgia Poet of the Year Award in 1992. His first national publication was the poem "The Lamar Tech Football Team Has Won its Game," published in The New Yorker in 1967, while he was a student at Lamar University in Beaumont, Texas. His first book of poems, Often in Different Landscapes, was a co-winner of the first AWP Poetry Competition in 1975. He edited several poetry anthologies, including The Made Thing: An Anthology of Contemporary Southern Poetry; Articles of War: American Poetry about World War II; and The Light the Dead See: The Selected Poems of Frank Stanford. His most recent book, You are Here: Poems New & Old, was published by the University of Arkansas Press in 2016. Among other awards, he was selected for a Robert Frost Fellowship in Poetry from the Bread Loaf Writers Conference; was awarded The Poets' Prize; and received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. Leon was widely admired as a masterful reader of poetry. There are no services scheduled at this time. A memorial celebration will be organized at a later date. In lieu of flowers, the family requests donations be made to The Frost Place Museum and Poetry Center (frostplace.org).