Featured Artist:
Carrie Jerrell

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Carrie Jerrell says she aims in her writing to celebrate the people of overlooked communities. Though she is a Hoosier at heart, she has developed a love of Kentucky, cultivated from living here for more than 10 years. Carrie Jerrell is the author of “After the Revival,” which received the Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize and was published in the U.S. and U.K. by Waywiser Press. Her poems have appeared in Image, Midwest Review, Birmingham Poetry Review, Exit 7 and Zone 3, among other publications. She earned her Master of Arts from the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University and her Ph.D. from Texas Tech University, where she was a Chancellor's Fellow. Carrie is the recipient of an Al Smith Individual Artist Fellowship from the Kentucky Arts Council, as well as residencies from the Kentucky Foundation for Women, the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts and the National Park Service. Currently, she works as an associate professor of English at Murray State University, where she also coordinates the creative writing program. She lives in Murray.

Artist's statement:

I grew up in southern Indiana, and while I'm still a Hoosier at heart, the soft spot I have for Kentucky, where I've lived for more than a decade now, keeps expanding. Both my Indiana and Kentucky homes have been in small towns surrounded by farms and woodland, a rural landscape that continues to dominate my work. In my poems, I aim to celebrate the people of these often overlooked communities, acknowledge their hardships and their hypocrisies and contemplate my place among them. My upbringing was also steeped in religion, and while I may spend my entire adult life reckoning with the particulars of such a childhood, I am grateful for the understanding it gave me early on that language can create communal, even transcendent, experiences; that poetry and prayer can be kin. I love poetry that sings, too, so I try to be as attentive to the music of my poems as I am to their meditations. All in all, writing poetry is one of the most pleasurable challenges I know, and I feel lucky to engage in it.

 

Carrie Jerrell
Murray, Ky.

Email: carrie.jerrell@gmail.com