Kelly Cherry

(December 21, 1940 - March 18, 2022)

Kelly Cherry is the former Poet Laureate of Virginia (2010–2012) and is the author of twenty-six books, ten chapbooks, and two translations of classical drama. She is an Emeritus Member of Poets Corner at the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine in New York City, and was the first recipient of the Hanes Poetry Prize from the Fellowship of Southern Writers. Her many other awards include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Rockefeller Foundation, a Bradley Achievement Award, the William “Singing Billy” Walker Award for Lifetime Achievement in Southern Letters, the L.E. Phillabaum Poetry Award, the Carole Weinstein Prize in Poetry, and a USIS Speaker Award (the Philippines). She is the Eudora Welty Professor Emerita of English and Evjue-Bascom Professor Emerita in the Humanities, University of Wisconsin Madison, and a University of Alabama in Huntsville Eminent Scholar, 2001-2005. She and her husband live on a farm in Virginia.

Praise for Kelly Cherry

Kelly Cherry takes on what few contemporary poets are willing to: the ways and hows of human existence, in both personal and historical terms. Tonally and technically, she has a wide range, being capable of writing touchingly intimate love poems on the one hand and treating natural objects with scientific precision on the other. The common denominator is the sensibility of a poet for whom all human perceptions, whether of inner experience or external things, turn into metaphor; that is to say, a language of meaning through connection.

—Lisel Mueller, winner of the Pulitzer Prize 

I know of no other contemporary poet who has quite her gifts. Hers is a poetry of deep intellectual as well as emotional commitment, and this fact is insurance that her poetry will endure when so much unfocused effusion has collapsed into deserving dust. Hers is a passionate intellection, and she embodies it in a bright tough music no one else matches or even approaches. 

—Fred Chappell, former Poet Laureate of North Carolina

Praise for Twelve Women in a Country Called America

These stories are thrilling to read.  They are bold and exploratory, truthful, and unflinching.  Kelly Cherry is a magnificent storyteller!

—Bobbie Ann Mason, author of In Country and The Girl in the Blue Beret

In these richly imagined stories, from New Orleans to Huntsville to Memphis to Richmond—all around the South and back again, women are working through their thwarted lives: afraid, defiant, longing, loving.  Kelly Cherry’s heroines are dramatically different from each other—the mannerly arts administrator in Charleston, the foolish retiree in Richmond, the ambitious African-Italian-Cuban-Ojibway student in Tallahassee, the restless lesbian in rural Virginia, the jilted wife in Bon Secour, the stalked beauty queen in Jackson—but they are all coming to terms with the human condition in ways that reveal that condition to the reader.  Funny, tender, surprising and exact, this is a stunning collection from a writer at the top of her form.

—Janet Burroway, author of Losing Tim: A Memoir

Twelve Women in a Country Called America is the latest instance of Kelly Cherry’s straight shooting about the often crooked kind we are. As before, she sees us, as the poet puts it, without feathers, gamely trying to plug the hole in the heart even as we scramble to harden the spongy spot in the head.  Clearly, ours are lives wobbling out of round. Herein, women and men, southerners every one, cleave to lies that sustain and stories that end happily. Kelly Cherry knows better. Kelly Cherry, going long or short between margins, is a national treasure.

—Lee K. Abbott, author of All Things, All at Once: New & Selected Stories

"In her latest story collection, Twelve Women in a Country Called America, Kelly Cherry deftly captures the lives of a remarkably diverse group of women from the American south. Each woman we meet in these stories is distinctly drawn and presented with heart, wit, and wisdom. That Kelly Cherry, one of our most talented and prolific contemporary writers, can show us our world and the women who populate it in such moving and memorable ways may not be a surprise, but, page after page, it’s an absolute pleasure and a gift that readers interested in the human condition will long cherish.”

—Judith Claire Mitchell, author of A Reunion of Ghosts 

Kelly Cherry is a writer's writer, a master storyteller who writes about people we recognize in a style so easy we're surprised to find ourselves suddenly in deep, deep water. The past often collides with the present in these complicated families, almost-families, and relationships; many of the stories turn on those moments when we find out who we truly are, or who we will become. I found myself wondering, how does Kelly Cherry know so much? Deeply psychological yet compulsively readable, these stories are like real stories told to us by a trusted  friend. 

—Lee Smith, author of Guests of Earth: A Novel and The Last Girls