Acclaimed Poet Mary Karr Comes to Andover

April 30, 2007

Mary Karr, award-winning poet and memoirist, is coming to the Phillips Academy campus on Friday, May 4, where she will conduct a poetry reading at 7:00 p.m. Following the reading, she will participate in a question-and-answer period and sign copies of her books, the most recent of which is Sinners Welcome, a poetry collection published in 2006 that chronicles her journey from agnosticism to sobriety and tempered Catholicism.

The poetry reading will be held in Kemper Auditorium in the Elson Art Center, located on Chapel Avenue on the Andover campus. The event is free and open to the public. No tickets required.

Prior to the evening event, Karr, who is visiting Andover on the Sandra Isham Vreeland Fund, will conduct a Master Class for creative writing students in the English department. In recent years, Isham poetry fellows have included Billy Collins, Robert Hass, and Richard Wilbur—all former U.S. Poet Laureates—and Paul Muldoon, winner of the Pulitzer Prize.

Considered a fresh, irreverent voice and a sometimes controversial figure in the literary world, Karr first gained widespread attention with her memoir, The Liar’s Club, published in 1995, in which she shares gritty tales of her troubled East Texas childhood. The book landed on the New York Times bestseller list for more than a year and helped launch an explosion in memoir writing. Since then, Karr has gone on to pen another memoir, Cherry, various essays, and several books of poetry, including Viper Rum and Sinners Welcome. Her poems and essays have won Pushcart prizes and have appeared in such magazines as The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and Parnassus.

Mary Karr is the Jesse Truesdell Peck Professor of Literature at Syracuse University. In 2004, she received a Guggenheim Fellowship for Poetry, and was previously a Radcliffe College Bunting Fellow.

The Sandra Isham Vreeland Fund was established in 1997 by Sheila E. and Heyward Isham '44 in memory of their daughter Sandra Isham Vreeland '76. The fund promotes the teaching of poetry and encourages and facilitates the creative spark in students' poetic expression.