News about the Frost Place Conference on Poetry and Teaching

I am thrilled to announce that Teresa Carson will be the new associate director of the 2013 Frost Place Conference on Poetry and Teaching!

Teresa is an accomplished poet and a stellar teacher with a long relationship to the Frost Place. She brings to the Conference both her tremendous talent as a writer, teacher, reader, and facilitator and her strong background in administration and development. Teresa will be working closely with Baron Wormser (director of educational outreach at the Frost Place) and me (director of the Frost Place Conference on Poetry and Teaching) as we deepen and expand our educational programs, and everyone is very excited about her new role.

Teresa grew up in Jersey City, New Jersey, the youngest of ten children in a blue-collar family. Currently she is associate publisher and development director at CavanKerry Press, but at the age of eighteen she was one of the first women hired to work in a non-traditional-for-women technical job at the local phone company. For more than thirty years she held various union and administrative positions before retiring in 2003. Meanwhile, she managed to acquire not one but two MFA degrees—one in poetry, the other in theater, both from Sarah Lawrence College.

Teresa’s extraordinary first collection, Elegy for the Floater, was published in 2008. “Though these poems can be harrowing,” writes Tom Lux, they are also filled with “relentless honesty, clarity, understatement, humor, and skill.”  She has since finished a second collection, The Congress of Human Oddities, which tells the story of a circus sideshow traveling through Ohio during the Civil War. She has adapted this book into a full-length play, Mister V.’s Congress of Human Oddities, which was produced at Sarah Lawrence College as part of the theater department’s spring 2009 season.