Born in Canton, a mill town in the mountains of western North Carolina, and raised on the family's farm. Educated at Duke University, he taught creative writing at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro for over twenty-five years.

Chappell's early reputation was based on the four novels he published between 1963 and 1973, one of which, Dagon (New York, 1968), received France's Prix de Meilleur des Livres Étrangers. His first volume of poems, The World Between the Eyes (1971), earned little recognition. Not until the publication of the tetralogy Midquest (1981), which reprinted four previously published books (River, Bloodfire, Wind Mountain, and Earthsleep), did Chappell's poetry attract significant critical attention. In 1985, largely on the strength of Midquest's achievement, Chappell was named, along with John *Ashbery, co-recipient of the Bollingen Prize. His other publications in the 1980s included a collection of short stories, two novels, and three additional books of poems.

Chappell's art derives from two major sources: his childhood and youth in the Appalachian mountains and his wide reading in the books, philosophical as well as literary, that have shaped Western culture. Among the most notable qualities of his poetry are its carefully crafted variety of forms, its fine story-telling and creation of character, its humour, and its serious moral intent. Chappell's poems reveal both enormous erudition and a profound commitment to what he has called ‘folk art’. In addition to the mountain community whose life Midquest records, the book also creates a striking sense of literary community and of a vital literary tradition through its varied poetic forms, its verse epistles to contemporary author-friends, and its countless references to other writers, especially Dante, whose spiritual quest Chappell's persona emulates. Castle Tzingal (1984), a moral allegory presented through a series of voices, Source (1985), and First and Last Words (1989), a volume largely composed of prefaces and afterwords to Chappell's reading, confirm his poetic range and power.

The Fred Chappell Reader (New York, 1987) reprinted thirty-four of the author's poems, including over a third of Midquest, together with a generous selection from his fiction. Since Spring Garden: New and Selected Poems (1995), he has published three further collections: Family Gathering (2000), Backsass (2004), and Shadow Box (2009—all Louisiana State University Press). Between 1997 and 2002 he was Poet Laureate of North Carolina. Oxford University Press 2013