Poetry Off the Shelf: Seeing Things Mary Karr

Mary Karr is an award-winning poet and best-selling memoirist. Her four volumes of poetry are Abacus (Wesleyan, 1986), The Devil’s Tour (New Directions, 1993), Viper Rum (Penguin, 1998), and Sinners Welcome (HarperCollins, 2006). She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation, as well as a Whiting Writers Award, and her work is regularly included in the Pushcart Prize and the Best American Poetry anthologies. The Liars’ Club established her as a bravely frank, wickedly funny, and incisively poetic chronicler of her own rough upbringing. The book drew universal acclaim from sources as diverse as The Nation, Vogue, and USA Today, as did its successor, Cherry. Her latest memoir, Lit, was an immediate best seller and was widely hailed as one of the best books of 2009. Karr is the Jesse Truesdell Peck Professor of Literature at Syracuse University and was the weekly poetry editor for the Washington Post Book World’s “Poet’s Choice” column.

Co-sponsored with the Art Institute of Chicago