Jared Carter



Jared Carter is an American poet and editor.

Life
Jared Carter was born in Elwood, Indiana on January 10, 1939. He studied at Yale University and at Goddard College. After military service and travel abroad, he made his home in Indianapolis, Indiana, where he has lived since 1969.

Carter worked for many years as an editor and interior designer of textbooks and scholarly works, first with the Bobbs-Merrill Company and later in association with Hackett Publishing Company.

Writing
Carter writes in free verse and in traditional forms. Much of his early work is set in "Mississinewa County", an imaginary place that includes the actual Mississinewa River, a tributary of the Wabash River. In recent years, as Carter has published increasingly on the web, his poetry has ranged farther afield.

His poems have appeared in literary journals in the U.S. and abroad and in the anthologies Twentieth-Century American Poetry, Contemporary American Poetry, and Writing Poems. Carter also produced a tanka sequence, [http://www.simplyhaiku.com/SHv7n1/tanka/Carter.html "A Country Visit", which was published in Simply Haiku.

An independent writer with no institutional backing or affiliation, he has participated in week-long workshops conducted by Philip Levine and by Howard Nemerov, and has on occasion sat and talked with poets as diverse as Robert Penn Warren, Robert Francis, William Stafford, James L. White, Felix Stefanile, Robert Creeley, Etheridge Knight, Jack Gilbert, and Larry Levis.

Recognition
Carter's first collection, Work, for the Night Is Coming, won the Walt Whitman Award. His second, After the Rain, received the Poets' Prize. He has received two literary fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts,, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Indiana Governor's Arts Award.

In 2008 Carter's poem "Heart's Forest," which appeared in issue # 38 of Lunch, received the Rosine Offen Memorial Award given by the Free Lunch'' Arts Alliance.

His poem Prophet Township, which first appeared in the Valparaiso Poetry Review, was selected as one of the best poems published online during 2007. It is included in the print anthology Best of the Web 2008 published by Dzanc Books.

Publications

 * Early Warning. Daleville, Indiana: Barnwood Press, 1979.
 * Work, for the Night Is Coming. New York: Macmillan, 1981. ISBN 1-880834-20-0
 * Fugue State. Daleville, Indiana: Barnwood Press, 1984. ISBN 0-935306-16-1
 * Pincushion’s Strawberry. Cleveland: Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 1984. ISBN 0-914946-43-9
 * Millennial Harbinger. Philadelphia: Slash & Burn Press, 1986. ISBN 0-938345-01-X
 * The Shriving. Tuscaloosa, Alabama: Duende Press, 1990.
 * Blues Project. Indianapolis: Writers’ Center Press, 1991. ISBN 1-880649-27-6
 * Situation Normal. Indianapolis: Writers’ Center Press, 1991.
 * After the Rain. Cleveland: Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 1993. ISBN 1-880834-03-0
 * Les Barricades Mystérieuses. Cleveland: Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 1999. ISBN 1-880834-40-5
 * Reading the Tarot: Nine Villanelles. E-book no. 17. Dayton, Washington: New Formalist Press, 2005.
 * Cross this Bridge at a Walk. Nicholasville, Kentucky: Wind Publications, 2006. ISBN 1-893239-46-2
 * Time Capsule. E-book no. 26. Dayton, Washington: New Formalist Press, 2007.
 * A Dance in the Street. Nicholasville, Kentucky: Wind Publications, 2012. ISBN 978-1-936138-27-2