Judy Jordan's first book of poetry, Carolina Ghost Woods, won the 1999 Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets, the 2000 National Book Critics Circle Award, the Utah Book of the Year Award, the OAY Award from the Poetry Council of North Carolina, as well as the Thomas Wolfe Literary Award. Her second book of poetry, Sixty Cent Coffee and a Quarter to Dance, was published by LSU press. Jordan currently lives in her own environmentally friendly earthbag-and-cob house, in which she lives with her rescued dogs off-grid, surrounded by the Shawnee National Forest. She teaches creative writing at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale.