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Biography:
Kelly Cherry is the author of nineteen books of fiction (novels, short stories), poetry, and nonfiction (memoir, essay, criticism), eight chapbooks, and translations of two classical plays. Her most recently published titles are The Retreats of Thought: Poems and Girl in a Library: On Women Writers and the Writing Life. Her short fiction has been reprinted in Best American Short Stories, Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards, The Pushcart Prize, and New Stories from the South, and has won three PEN/Syndicated Fiction Awards. In 2000 her collection The Society of Friends: Stories, received the Dictionary of Literary Biography Award for the best volume of short stories published in 1999. She was the first recipient of the Hanes Poetry Prize given by the Fellowship of Southern Writers for a body of work. Other awards include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Rockefeller Foundation, the Bradley Major Achievement (Lifetime) Award, a Distinguished Alumnus Award, three Wisconsin Arts Board fellowships and two New Work awards, an Arts America Speaker Award (The Philippines), and selection as a Wisconsin Notable Author. In 2010 she will be a visitor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.
Kelly was born in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, the middle child of three. Her parents were violinists who specialized in string quartets, especially the late Beethoven string quartets, though they also made a point of including a contemporary composition on each program, and though her father also composed, conducted, and gave solo concerts. After the family moved to Ithaca, New York, when she was five, the quartet was renamed the Ithaca String Quartet.
When she was nine the family moved to Chesterfield County, then outside and now part of Richmond, Virginia. There her father taught at Richmond Professional Institute (now Virginia Commonwealth University) and both parents continued their musical careers, offering an annual series of concerts at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts by what was now the Richmond String Quartet. Her father was a cofounder of the Richmond Symphony Orchestra. Her mother also worked.
After college, Kelly did graduate work in philosophy at the University of Virginia. There she met the writers George Garrett, Henry Taylor, R. H. W. Dillard. At UNC-Greensboro she studied with Fred Chappell, Allen Tate, Guy Owen, Randall Jarrell, Robert Watson. Visitors to the writing program included Stanley Kunitz, Eudora Welty, X. J. Kennedy, Carolyn Kizer. She also met her first husband, Jonathan Silver, who became a sculptor; with her M.F.A. in hand, she moved with him to New York City. The marriage ended in late 1969.
She held various jobs in Richmond and New York City. In 1977 she moved to Wisconsin, where she taught at UW-Madison until 1999, when she retired as Eudora Welty Professor Emerita of English and Evjue-Bascom Professor Emerita in the Humanities. In 2000 she married the fiction writer Burke Davis III. They live on a small farm in Virginia. Since leaving Madison, she has held named chairs and distinguished professorships at various universities. She will continue to consider short-term teaching positions.
Works by Kelly Cherry:
Fiction
Kelly Cherry is the author of nineteen books of fiction (novels, short stories), poetry, and nonfiction (memoir, essay, criticism), eight chapbooks, and translations of two classical plays. Her most recently published titles are The Retreats of Thought: Poems and Girl in a Library: On Women Writers and the Writing Life. Her short fiction has been reprinted in Best American Short Stories, Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards, The Pushcart Prize, and New Stories from the South, and has won three PEN/Syndicated Fiction Awards. In 2000 her collection The Society of Friends: Stories, received the Dictionary of Literary Biography Award for the best volume of short stories published in 1999. She was the first recipient of the Hanes Poetry Prize given by the Fellowship of Southern Writers for a body of work. Other awards include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Rockefeller Foundation, the Bradley Major Achievement (Lifetime) Award, a Distinguished Alumnus Award, three Wisconsin Arts Board fellowships and two New Work awards, an Arts America Speaker Award (The Philippines), and selection as a Wisconsin Notable Author. In 2010 she will be a visitor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.
Kelly was born in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, the middle child of three. Her parents were violinists who specialized in string quartets, especially the late Beethoven string quartets, though they also made a point of including a contemporary composition on each program, and though her father also composed, conducted, and gave solo concerts. After the family moved to Ithaca, New York, when she was five, the quartet was renamed the Ithaca String Quartet.
When she was nine the family moved to Chesterfield County, then outside and now part of Richmond, Virginia. There her father taught at Richmond Professional Institute (now Virginia Commonwealth University) and both parents continued their musical careers, offering an annual series of concerts at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts by what was now the Richmond String Quartet. Her father was a cofounder of the Richmond Symphony Orchestra. Her mother also worked.
After college, Kelly did graduate work in philosophy at the University of Virginia. There she met the writers George Garrett, Henry Taylor, R. H. W. Dillard. At UNC-Greensboro she studied with Fred Chappell, Allen Tate, Guy Owen, Randall Jarrell, Robert Watson. Visitors to the writing program included Stanley Kunitz, Eudora Welty, X. J. Kennedy, Carolyn Kizer. She also met her first husband, Jonathan Silver, who became a sculptor; with her M.F.A. in hand, she moved with him to New York City. The marriage ended in late 1969.
She held various jobs in Richmond and New York City. In 1977 she moved to Wisconsin, where she taught at UW-Madison until 1999, when she retired as Eudora Welty Professor Emerita of English and Evjue-Bascom Professor Emerita in the Humanities. In 2000 she married the fiction writer Burke Davis III. They live on a small farm in Virginia. Since leaving Madison, she has held named chairs and distinguished professorships at various universities. She will continue to consider short-term teaching positions.
Works by Kelly Cherry:
Fiction
- Twelve Women in a Country Called America: Stories. Press 53, May 2015.
- A Kind of Dream. Interlinked short stories, U. of Wisconsin Press, spring 2014. ISBN 978-0299297602
- The Woman Who. Boson Books (2010), Bitingduck Press. Short stories.
- My Life and Dr. Joyce Brothers. A novel in stories. Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, (1990); reprinted by University of Alabama Press, (2002).
- In the Wink of an Eye. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. 1983.; LSU Press, 2004, ISBN 978-0-8071-2966-1
- Sick and Full of Burning, Viking Press (1974); Ballantine (1975); reprinted by Boson Books (1995) ISBN 978-1-886420-16-8
- The Lost Traveller's Dream, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, (1984) ISBN 978-0-15-153617-7
- Augusta Played, Houghton Mifflin, (1979), ISBN 978-0-395-27573-3; Louisiana State University Press, (1984)
- We Can Still Be Friends, Soho Press, (2003) hardback; (2004) trade paper, ISBN 978-1-56947-323-8
- The Society of Friends: Stories, University of Missouri Press, (1999) ISBN 978-0-8262-1243-6
- Conversion, Treacle Press, (1979) ISBN 978-0-914232-28-5
- The Exiled Heart. LSU Press. 1991. ISBN 978-0-8071-1620-3.
- The Globe and the Brain: On Place in Fiction, Talking River Publications, Lewis-Clark State College, (2006) ISBN 978-0-911015-54-6
- Writing the World. University of Missouri Press. 1995. ISBN 978-0-8262-0992-4.
- History, Passion, Freedom, Death, and Hope: Prose about Poetry, University of Tampa Press, (2005) ISBN 978-1-879852-26-6
- The Poem: An Essay, Sandhills Press, 1999
- Girl in a Library: On Women Writers and the Writing Life, BkMk Press/University of Missouri-Kansas City, 2009, ISBN 978-1-886157-66-8
- Physics for Poets: Poems. Unicorn Press, spring 2015
- The Life and Death of Poetry: Poems, LSU Press, March 2013
- Vectors: J. Robert Oppenheimer: The Years before the Bomb, Parallel Press, 2012
- The Retreats of Thought: Poems. LSU Press. 2009. ISBN 978-0-8071-3478-8.
- Death and Transfiguration. LSU Press. 1997. ISBN 978-0-8071-2212-9.
- Benjamin John, March Street Press, 1993, ISBN 978-1-882983-01-8
- Hazard and Prospect: New and Selected Poems. LSU Press. 2007. ISBN 978-0-8071-3262-3.
- Natural Theology, Louisiana State University Press, 1988, ISBN 978-0-8071-1430-8
- Lovers and Agnostics, Carnegie Mellon University Press, 1995, ISBN 9780887482083
- An Other Woman, Somers Rocks Press, 2000
- God's Loud Hand. LSU Press. 1993. ISBN 978-0-8071-1821-4.
- Songs for a Soviet Composer, Singing Wind Press, 1980, ISBN 978-0-935896-02-2
- Rising Venus. LSU Press. 2002. ISBN 978-0-8071-2768-1.
- Time Out of Mind, March Street Press, 1994, ISBN 978-1-882983-08-7
- Relativity: A Point of View, Louisiana State University Press, 1977, ISBN 978-0-8071-0277-0
- Welsh Table Talk, The Book Arts Conservatory, 2004
- A Kelly Cherry Reader. TX: Stephen F. Austin State University Press, 2015. Intro by Fred Chappell.
- Antigone (trans.), in Sophocles, 2, ed. by Slavitt and Bovie
- Octavia (trans.), in Seneca: The Tragedies, Vol. 2, ed. Slavitt and Bovie
- Best American Short Stories (1972)
- Prize Stories: The O. Henry Award (1994)[12]
- The Pushcart Prize (1977)
- New Stories from the South (1989, 2009)
