Summary
William Fox, an art critic, artist, author, cultural geographer, editor and poet, was born in San Diego, California, on November 26, 1949, and moved to Reno when he was ten. His first chapbook of poetry, Iron Wind, was published when he was a senior at Claremont McKenna College, where he received his Bachelor of Arts degree in English in 1971. He has used the pseudonym Ian Tarnman for some of his writing. After working as the overseas editor for the New Zealand literary magazine Edge from 1969-1972, he took over the West Coast Poetry Review in Reno in 1972 from founder William Ransom and worked as its publisher and editor until 1993. His poems have been published in many literary magazines, including Counter/Measures, The Dragonfly, Ghost Dance, Out of Sight, Pebble, Poetry Australia, the Tennessee Poetry Journal, and Three Rivers Poetry Journal. In 1979, he was the Associate Director of the Reno Sierra Nevada Museum of Art (now the Nevada Museum of Art) and served as the Executive Director of the Nevada Council on the Arts (now the Nevada Arts Council) from 1984-1993. He ran the poetry program at the Squaw Valley Community of Creative Arts and has been a consultant to the National Assembly of State Arts Agencies and the National Endowment on the Arts. He has been a judge for the SouthWest Literary Center's Discovery Competition in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and has also coordinated the Western States Book Award. An editor of several books, he has served as an editorial consultant to the University of Nevada Press. His art has been exhibited in seven countries. In 2009, he became the director of the Nevada Museum of Art's new Center for Art + Environment.