Biography of Frank D. Moore (1936-2005)

Frank D. Moore was born May 17, 1936 in Owsley Country, eastern Kentucky, in the tiny town of Traveller’s Rest. For his first eight years of schooling he attended a one-room school, where his teacher was his mother Anne Moore. Difficult family relationships caused him to run away from home when he was 16. When he was in his 20s he began to attend the University of Cincinnati, from which he graduated with honors in 1964, and from which he received a master‘s degree in English in 1967. He taught at Kent State University-Tuscawaras and later at the Community College of Philadelphia, where he became chair of the Department of English. He did not begin writing poetry until he was in his 40s, but the poems, when they began, came out in a rush, many of them about his childhood in Traveller’s Rest. “I ran away from Traveller’s Rest when I was 16, because I thought nothing was happening there,” he once said at a reading. “Later I realized everything had happened there.” After contracting lung cancer, he went on medical leave from the Community College. In 1995 he published a chapbook, The Traveller’s Rest Poems. The following year he moved to Santa Fe with Gene Sheeley, where he lived until his death July 5, 2005.

He left many poems in manuscript form which had never been published. After his death his friend from Cincinnati Carol Rainey, with the assistance of his friends in Philadelphia and Santa Fe, assembled the poems into the collection, Night Singer: The Collected Poems of Frank D. Moore, which was published in April, 2008.

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