Kelly Cherry

Kelly Cherry in 2011. Photo by Burke Davis III. Licensed under Creative Commons, courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

Kelly Cherry
Born	Kelly Cherry December 21 1940 (1940-12-21) Baton Rouge, Louisiana, US
Occupation	Poet, novelist, essayist
Nationality	United States
Alma mater	University of Mary Washington, University of Virginia, University of North Carolina at Greensboro
Notable work(s)	We Can Still Be Friends Girl in a Library: On Women Writers & the Writing Life Hazard and Prospect: New and Selected Poems
Notable award(s)	Poet Laureate of Virginia (2010-2012)
Spouse(s)	Burke Davis III

Kelly Cherry (born December 21, 1940) is an American poet, novelist, and academic, who served as the Poet Laureate of Virginia (2010-2012).

Life

Youth

Cherry was born in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, but moved to Ithaca, New York at age 5, and Chesterfield County, Virginia, at age 9.

Cherry graduated from the University of Mary Washington in 1961, did graduate work at the University of Virginia as a Du Pont Fellow, and received a Master of Fine Arts from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.

Early career

Cherry 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

Poets Laureate of Virginia Carolyn Kreiter-Foronda (2006-2008), Claudia Emerson (2008-2010), & Kelly Cherry (2010-2012)in 2011. Photo by Ijil RHG. Licensed under Creative Commons, courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

Cherry 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, 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 New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Book Review, the Minneapolis paper, the Hollins Critic, America magazine, the Women's Review of Books, the London Independent, and others.

Private life

Cherry is married to Burke Davis III; together they live on a small rural farm near Halifax, in central Virginia.

Teaching positions in retirement

• Rivers-Coffey Distinguished Chair, Appalachian State University
• Louis D. Rubin, Jr., Writer-in-Residence, Hollins University
• Master Artist, Atlantic Center for the Arts
• Ferrol A. Sams, Jr., Distinguished Chair in English, Mercer University
• NEH Visiting Professor in the Humanities, Colgate University
• Eminent Scholar, University of Alabama, 1999-2004

While at U of Wisconsin

• Wyndham Robertson Writer-in-Residence, Hollins University
• Distinguished Professor, Rhodes College
• Full Professor and Distinguished Writer-in-Residence, Western Washington University

Other positions and posts

• Member, Electorate, Cathedral of St. John the Divine, NYC (five-year term beginning 2009)
• Associated Writing Programs Board of Directors (1990–93)
• Discipline Advisory Committee for Fulbright Awards (1991–94)
• Advisory Editor, Shenandoah (1988–92)
• Contributing Editor, The Hollins Critic (1996–present)

Writing

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'."

Recognition

Cherry was named Poet Laureate of Virginia by Governor Bob McDonnell in July 2010 for a two-year term.

Awards

• 2012 Recipient of the Carole Weinstein Poetry Prize
• 2012 Rebecca Mitchell Taramuto Short Fiction Prize for "On Familiar Terms," Blackbird at www.blackbird.vcu.edu
• 2011 The Bravo!Award by the Chesterfield Public Education Foundation, Chesterfield County Public Schools in Virginia, USA
• 2010 Director’s Visitor, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, New Jersey
• 2010 The Ellen Anderson Award (1st recipient) from the Poetry Society of Virginia
• 2009 Finalist (with Marvin Bell and Mark Jarman) for The Poets' Prize
• 2002 Book of the Year Award by ForeWord Magazine, Silver Prize for Poetry, for Rising Venus.
• 2000 Bradley Major Achievement Award (Lifetime), Council for Wisconsin Writers
• 2000 Distinguished Alumnus Award, University of Mary Washington
• 2000 Dictionary of Literary Biography Award for the best volume of short stories (The Society of Friends: Stories) published in 1999
• 1992 USIS Arts America Speaker Award (The Philippines). USIS is now called the USIA
• 1992, 1991 Wisconsin Arts Board New Work Awards
• 1991 First Prize for Book-length Fiction, Council for Wisconsin Writers (for My Life and Dr. Joyce Brothers)
• 1991 Wisconsin Notable Author, Literary Committee of the Wisconsin Library Association
• 1990 VCCA Writers Exchange with Soviet Writers' Union
• 1990, 1987, 1983 PEN Syndicated Fiction Awards
• 1989 Hanes Poetry Prize given by the Fellowship of Southern Writers for a body of work, first recipient.
• 1980 First Prize for Book-length Fiction, Council for Wisconsin Writers (for Augusta Played)
• 1974 Canaras Award for first novel, Sick and Full of Burning

Fellowships

• 2009 Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship, USA
• 2005 Fellow, Le Moulin à Nef, Auvillar, France
• 1994 Hawthornden Residency Fellowship, Scotland
• 1991, 1988, 1984 Wisconsin Arts Board Fellowships, USA
• 1989, 1979 Fellow, Yaddo
• 1986 Fellow, The Ragdale Foundation, USA
• 1979 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, USA
• 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)
• 1975 Allan Collins Fellowship, Bread Loaf, USA

Publications

Poetry

• Relativity: A point of view: Poems. Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1977.
• Songs for a Soviet Composer. St. Louis, MO: Singing Wind Press, 1980.
• Loneliness: Words for a secular canticle. Winston-Salem, NC:
• Natural Theology. Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1988.
• God's Loud Hand: Poems. Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1993.
• Benjamin John. Greensboro, NC: March Street Press, 1993.
• Time Out of Mind. Greensboro, NC: March Street Press, 1994.
• Lovers and Agnostics. Pittsburgh, PA: Carnegie Mellon University Press, 1995.
• Death and Transfiguration. Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1997.
• An Other Woman. Brooklyn, NY: Somers Rocks Press, 2000.
• Rising Venus: Poems. Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 2002.
• Welsh Table Talk: Poetry. Washington, DC: Book Arts Conservatory, 2004.
• Hazard and Prospect: New and selected poems. Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 2007.
• The Retreats of Thought: Poems. Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 2009.
• Vectors: J. Robert Oppenheimer: The Years before the Bomb. Madison, WI: Parallel Press, 2012.
• The Life and Death of Poetry: PoemsBaton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 2013.

Novels

• Sick and Full of Burning. New York: Viking Press, 1974.
• Conversion. New Paltz, NY: Treacle Press, 1979.
• Augusta Played: A novel. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1979; Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1998.
• In the Wink of an Eye: A novel. San Diego, CA: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983; Raleigh, NC: Boson Books, 1999; Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 2004.
• The Lost Traveller's Dream: A novel. San Diego, CA: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1984.
• We Can Still Be Friends: A novel. New York: Soho, 2003.
• The Woman Who. Raleigh, NC: Boson Books, 2010.

Short fiction

• The Society of Friends: Stories. Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 1999.
• My Life and Dr. Joyce Brothers: A novel in stories. Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 1990; Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 2002.
• A Kind of Dream: Stories. Madison, WI: Terrace Books / University of Wisconsin Press, 2014.

Non-fiction

• The Exiled Heart: A meditative autobiography. Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1991.
• Writing the World. Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 1995.
• The Poem: An Essay. Grand Island, NE: Sandhills Press, 1999.
• History, Passion, Freedom, Death, and Hope: Prose about poetry. Tampa, FL: University of Tampa Press, 2005.
• The Globe and the Brain: On place in fiction: an essay. Lewiston, ID: Talking River Publications / Lewis & Clark State College, 2006.
• Girl in a Library: On women writers and the writing life. Kansas City, MO: BkMk Press / University of Missouri / Kansas City, 2009.

Translated

• Seneca, Octavia, in Seneca: The tragedies: Volume II ((edited by David R. Slavitt & Palmer Bovie). Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985.
• Sophocles, "Three poems from Antigone," in Kenyon Review, 20:3-4 (1998), 62.
• Sophocles, Antigone, in Sophocles, 2 (edited by David R. Slavitt & Palmer Bovie). Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998.
• Octavia (trans.), in Seneca: The Tragedies, Vol. 2, ed. Slavitt and Bovie

Alzheimer's By Kelly Cherry

Except where noted, bibliographical information courtesy WorldCat.

Audio / video

• Kelly Cherry (DVD). Farmville, VA: Longwood University, 2012.

See also

• List of U.S. poets

Preceded by Claudia Emerson

Poet Laureate of Virginia 2010-2012

Succeeded by Sofia Starnes

References

• Elliot, Okla. What Kelly Cherry Knows. "An Embarrassment of Riches". Inside Higher Ed BlogU. Inside the Education of Ornate Churm. August 4, 2011.
• Alger, Derek. "From the Editor: Interview with Kelly Cherry". PIF Magazine. October 1, 2010.

External links

Poems

• "Merida (Yucatan)"
• "Alzheimer's"
• Kelly Cherry at the Poetry Foundation
• Kelly Cherry at PoemHunter (1 poem, "Sappho in Her Study")

Audio / video

• Kelly Cherry at YouTube

Books

• Kelly Cherry at Amazon.com

About

• Kelly Cherry Official website.
• Kelly Cherry interviewed by Derek Alger at pif magazine.
• "Words Will Take You Anywhere: An interview with Kelly Cherry" at Southern Scribe.

Etc.

• Poets Laureate of Virginia from the Library of Congress