William Carpenter is the author of three books of poetry, The Hours of Morning, Poems 1976-1979 (University Press of Virginia, 1981), Rain (Northeastern University Press, 1985), Speaking Fire at Stones (Tilbury House, 1992), and (to date) three novels, A Keeper of Sheep (Milkweed Editions, 1996), The Wooden Nickel (Little, Brown & Co., 2002), and Silence (Islandport Press, 2021).