Catherine Carter is a poet, educator, and scholar, and she is the author of four full-length collections of poetry (By Stone and Needle, Larvae of the Nearest Stars, The Swamp Monster at Home, The Memory of Gills, all with LSU Press), two chapbooks (Marks of the Witch, and Good Morning, Unseen both with Jacar Press), and a co-translated edition of the 33,000-line poem Confessio Amantis by 14th-century poet, John Gower.
“Carter’s voice, her ken, her wont of saying, summons language so achingly luminous, so piercing, so boldly wry, that it defies categorization. The hybrid, high-wire risks she takes are wildly audacious. It’s impossible to not be astonished, spellbound, and ultimately subsumed, by this verse. — Joseph Bathanti, NC Poet Laureate (emeritus)“
!!! New !!!
Winner of the 2025
By Stone and Needle
L. E. Phillabaum Poetry Award
Available July 1, 2025 from
LSU Press
AWARDS AND HONORS
- 2025 L. E. Phillabaum Poetry Award for By Stone and Needle
- Roanoke-Chowan Award from the North Carolina Literary and Historical Association
- James Applewhite Poetry Prize from the North Carolina Literary Review
- Jacar Press chapbook contest win (Marks of the Witch, 2013)
- Multiple Pushcart nominations
- And several more
Can we just switch to the first person now that the bio’s over?–As a professor at Western Carolina University, I teach poetry, English Education, and grammar. As you might imagine, these connect at all kinds of levels.
If you’re looking for someone to read at an event or bookstore, or participate in a literary festival, or run workshops at a retreat or writer’s event, please feel free to contact me. I offer a number of workshop topics, and I can assure you that I respect the need for a poet to not only edify but entertain an audience–‘sentence and solaas’ as Chaucer would say; my readings are, in the word’s of the medieval poet John Gower, ‘somwhat of lust, somewhat of lore’.
If you’re a 9-12 English teacher in or near southern Appalachia, I’d be glad to correspond with you to exchange strategies for making poetry less frightening and painful to your students and to brainstorm more ways to use poetry to address the CCSS or NC SCoS. I also enjoy visiting classrooms (on a volunteer basis) to show students some accessible, non-frightening poems and talk about how to interact with them without shame, fear, or harm. (I don’t mean my own poems–this isn’t a ploy to inflict my work on kids. This is about teaching.)
So give a shout if you need an accessible, teacher-trained poet for your literary festival, Visiting Writers series, or class visits–it’s a crying shame how many kids hate and fear poetry before middle school, and I’d love to help move that needle in the other direction. — Catherine Carter (email me)
Catherine Carter 