William Hathaway was born in Madison, Wisconsin and grew up in Ithaca, New York. He attended the American College in Paris, Cornell University, the University of Montana (BA 1967) and the University of Iowa (MFA 1969).

Like the vast majority of living poets, Hathaway has made most of his living as a college teacher. He has taught at Louisiana State University (where he directed the creative writing program during the late seventies and early eighties), at Cornell University, Union College, and most recently at Southampton College.  He has been an adjunct at the University of Maine, SUNY-Cortland, and the College of the Atlantic, and has been a visiting writer at a variety of summer conferences, and university and community programs. At this time, he lives in retirement with his wife, Ellen, in Fairfield, Pennsylvania.

Hathaway has published hundreds of poems in magazines and university journals since 1966. His short stories have appeared in Epoch, Fiction International, The Southern Review, and The Hudson Review. His essays and journalism have been published on a variety of subjects including education, the ambiguities of American social classes, and the state of the literary scenery.

Hathaway’s poems can be found in four anthologies which represent radically different movements in contemporary poetics: Strong Measures: Contemporary Poetry in Traditional Forms, Dacey & James editors (Harper & Row, 1985), New American Poets of the 90s, Weingarten & Myers editors (Wampeter Press, 1985) and Ecstatic Occasions, Expedient Forms, editor David Lehman (Macmillan 1987), Up Late: American Poetry Since 1970, editor Andrei Codrescu. Hathaway was the regular columnist for The Greenfield Review Literary Center Newsletter in the late eighties.

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