Mary Karr

1989 Winner in
Poetry

Mary Karr is an award-winning poet and best-selling memoirist. She is the author of the critically-acclaimed and New York Times best-selling memoirs The Liars' Club, Cherry, and Lit, as well as the Art of Memoir, and five poetry collections, most recently Tropic of Squalor. Karr is also a songwriter, having collaborated with Rodney Crowell, Norah Jones, Lucinda Williams and others on a country album called KIN. A sought after speaker, she has given distinguished talks at prestigious universities, libraries, and writers' festivals across the world. Karr welcomes conversation with her audience and she is known for her spirited, lively, and engaging Q&A sessions. Her many awards include a Whiting Award in Poetry, an NEA, a Radcliffe Bunting Fellowship, and a Guggenheim. She is also a regular contributor to The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and Poetry magazine. Karr is the Peck Professor of Literature at Syracuse University and lives in New York City. 

Reviews & Praise

“Searing . . . [Karr] has written a book that lassos you, hogties your emotions and won’t let you go . . . Explores the subjectivity of memory even as it chronicles with searching intelligence, humor and grace the author’s slow, sometimes exhilarating, sometimes painful discovery of her vocation and her voice as a poet and writer . . . Karr writes with such intensity and poetry . . . This struggle to reconcile her past and present, her family and her future, is the steel-wired ribbon that not only runs through this affecting book, but that also connects it to Ms. Karr’s two earlier memoirs—the bright, elastic thread on which she so deftly strings the colored beads of her tumultuous life.” —Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times [on Lit]

“This book is so good I thought about sending it out for a back-up opinion . . . It’s like finding Beethoven in Hoboken. To have a poet’s precision of language and a poet’s insight into people applied to one of the roughest, toughest, ugliest places in America is an astonishing event.” —Molly Ivins, The Nation [on The Liars’ Club]

“Skepticism is mitigated by Karr’s humor, her mildly ironic stance and her capacity for wry self-examination. Theology takes on a kind of earthy insight . . . As Karr knows, her endeavor is ages old. It may be that all lyric poetry aspires to prayer. What gives Sinners Welcome its sharp edge is the poet’s eloquently passionate struggle at the junction of doubt and devotion.” —Judith Kitchen, The Washington Post

Selected Works

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Outside Links
Kin (Songs by Rodney Crowell & Mary Karr)
Interview (Paris Review)