Darnell Arnoult, Work

Darnell Arnoult was born in Martinsville, Virginia in 1955 to a Baptist beautician from Draper, North Carolina and a Catholic architect from Memphis, Tennessee. During her junior year year of high school, she developed a love of reading and decided to become a writer. Shortly after her decision, Arnoult got married and became the mother to two children. By twenty-five, she was divorced and a single parent. Arnoult supported her family for nineteen years through a series of odd jobs, from delivering newspapers, changing headings on library cards, and cleaning houses, to working as a chair-side dental assistant, a secretary in an occupational therapy unit, and a counselor to prisoners in a minimum-security facility. She received a BA in American Studies with a concentration in Southern Folklore from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She served as an arts and education administrator at the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University, receiving her MA in English and Creative Writing from North Carolina State University. While in North Carolina, Arnoult published several short stories and poems and taught creative writing for the Duke Short Course Program and the Duke Writers Workshop.

Arnoult lived the first nineteen years of her life in the foothills of Virginia — Martinsville, Danville, Fieldale, and Bassett. She then passed the next twenty-five years in North Carolina, in the Chapel Hill and Durham area, with a short stint at Camp Lejeune and a year in Irmo, South Carolina. On April Fool's Day 2000, she married a cowboy and moved to middle Tennessee, where her husband encouraged her to ride horses and to write full time. At the age of forty-nine, she became a grandmother and published author, when What Travels With Us, her first book of poems, was released by Louisiana State University Press. What Travels With Us is the winner of the 2005 Weatherford Award from the Appalachian Studies Association and Berea College, as well as the Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance Poetry Book of the Year. Her first novel, Sufficient Grace, debuted in June 2006, shortly after her fiftieth birthday. Arnoult now lives in Brush Creek, Tennessee.