I enjoy creating and spreading knowledgeable content for everyone around the world and try my best not to leave even the smallest of mistakes go unnoticed.
University of Mary WashingtonUniversity of VirginiaUniversity of North Carolina at Greensboro
Notable works
Twelve Women in a Country Called America: StoriesA Kind of DreamGirl in a Library: On Women Writers & the Writing LifeHazard and Prospect: New and Selected PoemsThe Retreats of Thought
Hazard and Prospect, We can still be friends, A Kind of Dream: Stories, Rising Venus, The Life and Death of Poetry
Occupation
Poet, author, essayist
Kelly cherry 2011 national book festival
Kelly Cherry (born December 21, 1940) is an award winning novelist, poet, essayist, and a former Poet Laureate of Virginia (2010–2012). A resident of Halifax, Virginia, she was named the state's Poet Laureate by Governor Bob McDonnell in July 2010. She succeeded Claudia Emerson in this post (Poet Laureate of Virginia, 2008–2010).
Award-winning poet and novelist Kelly Cherry is concerned with philosophy; with, as she explains it, "the becoming-aware of abstraction in real life--since, in order to abstract, you must have something to abstract from." Within her novels, the abstract notions of morality become her focus: "My novels deal with moral dilemmas and the shapes they create as they reveal themselves in time," she once told CA. "My poems seek out the most suitable temporal or kinetic structure for a given emotion." Writing in the Dictionary of Literary Biography Yearbook: 1983 on Cherry's fiction, Mark Harris concluded that "she manages to capture, in very readable stories, the indecisiveness and mute desperation of life in the twentieth century."
From the beginning of her career, Cherry has written both formal verse and free verse. According to the citation preceding her receipt of the James G. Hanes Poetry Prize by the Fellowship of Southern Writers in 1989, "Her poetry is marked by a firm intellectual passion, a reverent desire to possess the genuine thought of our century, historical, philosophical, and scientific, and a species of powerful ironic wit which is allied to rare good humor." Reviewing Relativity, Patricia Goedicke noted in Three Rivers Poetry Journal that "her familiarity with the demands and pressures of traditional patterns has resulted...in an expansion and deepening of her poetic resources, a carefully textured over- and underlay of image, meaning and diction." Mark Harris felt that Cherry's "ability to sustain a narrative by clustering and repeating images [lends] itself to longer forms, and 'A Bird's Eye View of Einstein,' the longest poem in [Relativity], is an example of Cherry at her poetic best." Reviewing Cherry's collection, Death and Transfiguration, Patricia Gabilondo wrote in The Anglican Theological Review that "the abstract prose poem 'Requiem' that closes this book...translates personal loss into the historical and universal, providing an occasion for philosophical meditation on the mystery of suffering and the need for transcendence in a post-Holocaust world that seems to offer none. Moving through the terrors of nihilism and doubt, Cherry, in a poem that deftly alternates between the philosophically abstract and the image's graphic force, gives us an intellectually honest and deeply moving vision of our relation to each other's suffering and of God's relation to humanity's 'memory of pain'."
Cherry graduated from the University of Mary Washington in 1961, did graduate work at the University of Virginia in Philosophy as a Du Pont Fellow, and received a Masters of Fine Arts from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. After working in publishing for some years, she accepted a position at Southwest Minnesota State College. She began teaching at the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1977. Kelly Cherry is the Eudora Welty Professor Emerita of English and Evjue-Bascom Professor Emerita in the Humanities at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.
She has received numerous literary and academic honors. Cherry continues to give numerous public and private readings, often teaming with other notable Poets Laureate of Virginia such as Claudia Emerson and Carolyn Kreiter-Foronda.
She has published reviews widely, including for the NYT, the LA Times, the Chicago Book Review, the Minneapolis paper, the Hollins Critic, America magazine, the Women's Review of Books, the London Independent, and others.
Weather, poems. A chapbook. N.Y.: Rain Mountain Press, 2017.
Quartet for J. Robert Oppenheimer: A Poem. (In shorter poems.) LSU Press, February 2017.
Physics for Poets: Poems. Unicorn Press, spring 2015
The Life and Death of Poetry: Poems, LSU Press, March 2013
Vectors: J. Robert Oppenheimer: The Years before the Bomb, Parallel Press, 2012
The Retreats of Thought: Poems. LSU Press. 2009. ISBN 978-0-8071-3478-8.
Death and Transfiguration. LSU Press. 1997. ISBN 978-0-8071-2212-9.
Benjamin John, March Street Press, 1993, ISBN 978-1-882983-01-8
Hazard and Prospect: New and Selected Poems. LSU Press. 2007. ISBN 978-0-8071-3262-3.
Natural Theology, Louisiana State University Press, 1988, ISBN 978-0-8071-1430-8
Lovers and Agnostics, Carnegie Mellon University Press, 1995, ISBN 9780887482083
An Other Woman, Somers Rocks Press, 2000
God's Loud Hand. LSU Press. 1993. ISBN 978-0-8071-1821-4.
Songs for a Soviet Composer, Singing Wind Press, 1980, ISBN 978-0-935896-02-2
Rising Venus. LSU Press. 2002. ISBN 978-0-8071-2768-1.
Time Out of Mind, March Street Press, 1994, ISBN 978-1-882983-08-7
Relativity: A Point of View, Louisiana State University Press, 1977, ISBN 978-0-8071-0277-0
Welsh Table Talk, The Book Arts Conservatory, 2004
Other
A Kelly Cherry Reader. TX: Stephen F. Austin State University Press, 2015. Intro by Fred Chappell. Stories, novel excerpts, essays (familiar, instructive), eight poems.
Translations
Antigone (trans.), in Sophocles, 2, ed. by Slavitt and Bovie
Octavia (trans.), in Seneca: The Tragedies, Vol. 2, ed. Slavitt and Bovie
1978 Fellow, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, USA. Also, 1985; 1986; December–January 1987/1988; 1989; December–February 1990/1991; 2003; 2004; 2007; 2011 (Weinstein Fellow); June 13-July 14, 2013
