Jeffery Beam (born 4 April 1953, Concord, North Carolina) is an American poet, writer, and editor. A retired botanical librarian at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Beam lives in Hillsborough, North Carolina, with husband Stanley Finch.
Jeffery Scott Beam was born in Concord, North Carolina and grew up in nearby Kannapolis.. Beam attended the Kannapolis City School system, graduating in 1971 from A. L. Brown High School where he edited the campus newspaper, Brown Beat. He was inducted into the A. L. Brown Hall of Fame at graduation and awarded his class's Creative Writing Award. Beam received his Bachelor of Creative Arts in Writing from UNC-Charlotte in 1975, an experimental program inspired by Black Mountain College and other independent and experimental programs. While there he was editor of the campus literary magazine Sanskrit and contributing editor to other local student publications.
Jeffery Beam became friends with poet, photographer, critic, art collector, and publisher Jonathan Williams in 1979. Williams became a close friend, primary mentor, and sometimes publisher to Beams until Williams' death in 2008, introducing him to other artists and writers James Broughton, Michael Rumaker, and others.
Beam's work on Jonathan Williams includes co-editing with Richard Owens, The Lord of Orchards: Jonathan Williams at 80, an online feature Jacket magazine, which led to Jonathan Williams: The Lord of Orchards (Prospecta Press, 2018), an expanded book-length survey of Williams' life and work. A Snowflake Orchard a personal history with bibliography of The Jargon Society appeared in the North Carolina Literary Review. Tales of a Jargonaut, a lightly edited interview with Jonathan Williams by Beam was published in Rain Taxi in 2003.
Jeffery Beam is the author of over 25 works:
Limited editions of Jeffery Beam's work from fine presses include:
Beam and photographer John M. Hall co-curated an exhibition of Hall's photographs of Harlem Renaissance poet Anne Spencer's Lynchburg home for the UNC-Chapel Hill Center for the Study of the American South in 2015.
Collaborating with ceramicist Judith Ernst in 2016 led to the creation of two large vessels carved with his poems, Holding the Center (North Carolina Ceramics collection Mint Museum, Charlotte), and Pause ⦠Now Go (North Carolina Pottery collection, BRAHM â Blowing Rock Art and History Museum).
Poems set to music:
An Elizabethan Bestiary: Retold, illustrated by Ippy Patterson, was awarded a grant from the Mary Duke Biddle Foundation, won a 1999 American Institute of Graphic Arts 50 Books / 50 Covers award, and a 2000 IPPY Award for one of the 10 Outstanding Small Press / Independent Publisher Books of 1999.
His two CD multimedia collection What We Have Lost: New and Selected Poems 1977-2001 was an Audio Publishers Award finalist. Other awards and nominations, including from the American Library Association, are noted on his website.
His poem "Song of the University Worker" was adopted in 2009 as the official University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill staff poem.
Jeffery Beam's archive is included in the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's Special Collections. There are smaller collections at the J. Murrey Atkins Library of the University of North Carolina at Charlotte; the ONE Archives at the University of Southern California; the Stonewall National Museum, Archives, and Library in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.