Photo by Terri Clark Photoghraphy

Born on the eastern shore of Maryland and raised there by wolves and vultures, Catherine Carter now lives in Cullowhee with her husband near Western Carolina University, where she teaches in and coordinates the English education program. Her first full-length collection, The Memory of Gills (LSU, 2006) received the 2007 Roanoke-Chowan Award from the North Carolina Literary and Historical Association; her poem “Toast” won the 2009 North Carolina Writer’s Network Randall Jarrell award. Her work has also appeared or is forthcoming in Poetry, North Carolina Literary Review, Tar River Poetry Review, Cider Press Review, and Best American Poetry 2008, among others, and has been twice nominated for the Pushcart Prize.

Here is one of her Poems, It first appeared in Poetry

THE FALL

One afternoon when he was seven, rocking

on the porch-rail spelling out words about stars,

his hooked-in heel slipped, and he pitched back

into the grass. When he could look, the lawn’s

low clover was like something in his book:

a vast reach thick with clusters, sweeps of stars,

he thought, and winged things tending stars,

bearing some bright dust the little way

between the stars’ white tremors. It was only

the usual thing, pain, which told him

he wasn’t dead, that these were not

angels (which he knew about from Sundays)

touching stars into shine. Only hurt

whispered to him that this world

was his world, that these were bees

not angels, that the yards all white

with clover were not the fields of heaven.