Role Author Name Kelly Cherry | Spouse Burke Davis III Nationality United States | |
Born Kelly Cherry
21 December 1940 (age 83)
Baton Rouge, Louisiana, US ( 1940-12-21 ) Alma mater University of Mary Washington
University of Virginia
University of North Carolina at Greensboro Notable works Twelve Women in a Country Called America: Stories
A Kind of Dream
Girl in a Library: On Women Writers & the Writing Life
Hazard and Prospect: New and Selected Poems
The Retreats of Thought Notable awards Poet Laureate of Virginia (2010–12) Education University of Virginia, University of North Carolina at Greensboro, University of Mary Washington People also search for Jaimy Gordon, Ursule Molinaro, Imants Kalnins Books 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).
Contents
- Kelly cherry 2011 national book festival
- Kelly cherry reading 6 22 05
- Literary themes and styles
- Early life
- Early career
- Later career
- Teaching positions in retirement
- While at U of Wisconsin
- Other positions and posts include
- Published works
- Fiction
- Nonfiction
- Poetry
- Other
- Translations
- Publications in Prize Anthologies
- Publications in Anthologies
- Honors
- Awards
- Fellowships
- References
Kelly cherry reading 6 22 05
Literary themes and styles
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'."
Early life
Kelly was born in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, but moved to Ithaca, New York, at age 5, and Chesterfield County, Virginia, at age 9.
Early career
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.
Later career
She retired in 1999, after 22 years (23 in Madison), and in retirement continues to hold those titles while also holding named chairs and distinguished writer positions at the University of Alabama in Huntsville (Eminent Scholar), Colgate University, Mercer University, Atlantic Center for the Arts, and Hollins University.
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.
Teaching positions in retirement
While at U of Wisconsin
Other positions and posts include
Published works
Kelly Cherry has written over 25 fiction, poetry, and non-fiction books, eleven chapbooks and two translations of classical plays.