Kelly Cherry

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'."

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.

• 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 in Huntsville, 1999-2004

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

• Member, Electorate, Cathedral of St. John the Divine, NYC (five-year term beginning 2009; extended to 2016; now Electorate Emeritus)
• 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)
• Contributing Editor, The Smart Set (2015–present)

Honors

• 2010–12Poet Laureate of Virginia

Awards

• 2017 The William "Singing Billy" Walker Award forLifetime Achievement in Southern Letters
• 2016 Lifetime Achievement Award from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro
• 2015Finalist, Library of Virginia Fiction Award for A Kind of Dream: Stories.
• 2015Selected by LJ among 30 Top Indie Fiction titles.
• 2013L. E. Phillabaum Poetry Award
• 2012Carole Weinstein Poetry Prize
• 2012Rebecca Mitchell Taramuto Short Fiction Prize for "On Familiar Terms," Blackbird at www.blackbird.vcu.edu
• 2011The Bravo!Award by the Chesterfield Public Education Foundation, Chesterfield County Public Schools in Virginia, USA
• 2010Finalist, People's Choice Awards, Library of Virginia, for Girl in a Library: On Women Writers & the Writing Life
• 2010Director’s Visitor, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, New Jersey
• 2010The Ellen Anderson Award (first recipient) from the Poetry Society of Virginia
• 2009Finalist (with Marvin Bell and Mark Jarman) for The Poets' Prize
• 2009Finalist, Book of the Year Award, ForeWord Magazine, nonfiction, for Girl in a Library: On Women Writers and the Writing Life
• 2002Book of the Year Award by ForeWord Magazine, Silver Prize for Poetry, for Rising Venus.
• 2000Bradley Major Achievement Award (Lifetime), Council for Wisconsin Writers
• 2000Distinguished Alumnus Award, University of Mary Washington
• 2000Dictionary of Literary Biography Award for the best volume of short stories (The Society of Friends: Stories) published in 1999
• 1999Leidig Lectureship in Poetry, Emory & Henry College
• 1992USIS Arts America Speaker Award (The Philippines). USIS is now called the USIA
• 1992, 1991Wisconsin Arts Board New Work Awards
• 1991VCCA Writers Exchange Fellow (with Edwin Honig et al.) to Russia (Leningrad, Peredelkino, Yalta)
• 1991First Prize for Book-length Fiction, Council for Wisconsin Writers (for My Life and Dr. Joyce Brothers)
• 1991Wisconsin Notable Author, Literary Committee of the Wisconsin Library Association
• 1990, 1987, 1983PEN Syndicated Fiction Awards
• 1989Hanes Poetry Prize given by the Fellowship of Southern Writers for a body of work, first recipient.
• 1980First Prize for Book-length Fiction, Council for Wisconsin Writers (for Augusta Played)
• 1974Canaras Award for first novel, Sick and Full of Burning

Fellowships

• 2009Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship, USA
• 2005Fellow, Le Moulin à Nef, Auvillar, France
• 1997WARF Award (Eudora Welty Chair)
• 1993Bascom Award (Evjue-Bascom Chair)
• 1994Hawthornden Residency Fellowship, Scotland
• 1991, 1988, 1984Wisconsin Arts Board Fellowships, USA
• 1989, 1979Fellow, Yaddo
• 1986Fellow, The Ragdale Foundation, USA
• 1984UW Chancellor's Award
• 1983UW Romnes Fellowship
• 1979National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, USA
• 1978Fellow, 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
• 1975Allan Collins Fellowship, Bread Loaf, USA