The Lost Books of the Bestiary is both requiem and elegy. The arrangement of the poems is evolutionary in nature, an exploration of a natural world that continues to teach us one of life’s greatest paradoxes: that only in loss do we truly understand the essence of that which is now gone.

The Lost Book of the Bestiary, a finalist for V Press LC’s Poetry Book Prize, is his first collection of poems. His poetry has appeared in The Southern Poetry Review, The Virginia Quarterly Review, The South Carolina Review, and other publications. His work has won numerous awards including the Edgar Allen Poe Award, The Sarah Lockwood Sonnet Prize, The Ekphrastic Poetry Award and others from the Poetry Society of Virginia, the Bayley Museum’s “Writer’s Eye” competition, and he has has been nominated twice for the Pushcart Prize. In addition, he was a finalist for the 2018 Alexandria Quarterly Poetry Chapbook Contest.

Chapman Hood Frazier was born in Clarksburg, West Virginia and has lived most of his life in Virginia. He completed a BA and MA at West Virginia University and wrote a creative thesis, How to Make Magic: Writing Poetry from Dreams. He completed a MS in Reading from Longwood College and a Ph.D. from the University of Virginia. During his tenure there, he was an associate director of the Young Writer’s Workshop and a board member of the Crossroad’s Waldorf School. He has taught at Southside Virginia Community College, Murray High School, The University of Maine at Presque Isle, and as a professor of English Education at Longwood University and James Madison University, and he is the recipient of the nationally recognized, “Good Neighbor Award” for outstanding teaching.

Frazier was poetry editor for Longwood University’s Dos Passo’s Review for three yearsand a guest editor for The Hampden-Sydney Poetry Review. He has also published interviews with contemporary American and Northern Irish poets in Agni Online, Shenandoah, The Writer’s Chronicle and in The Weight of the Weather: Regarding the Poetry of Ted Kooser. His work with Kooser was also included in the 2015 Poetry Criticism edited by Lawrence Trudeau.

Currently, he lives with his wife, Deborah Carrington and near his two children, and Dylan and Caitlin, in Rice, Virginia