Introducing Teresa Carson: 2015 Frost Place Conference on Poetry and Teaching Faculty

Since 2012, when I took over directorship of the Frost Place Conference on Poetry and Teaching, the program's associate director, Teresa Carson, has been my stay and my support. On the surface, we are complete opposites: tall, short; rural, urban; excited about bears, not excited about bears. But in so many other ways we are symbiotic. Like me, Teresa is passionate about the long historical conversation of poetry--Melville, Emerson, Dickinson, Keats--but she grounds that dialogue in a present-tense engagement with her own particulars and those of the world around her. At the Frost Place, we work with so many teachers who are charged with exactly this task--that is, of finding ways to pull the literature of the past into active interaction with their students' growing minds. Thus, Teresa's acute sensitivity to this connection has been invaluable, not only to me personally but also to conference participants and the trajectory of the program.

In addition to serving as the conference's associate director, Teresa is associate publisher at CavanKerry Press. She is the author of two collections of poetry, Elegy for the Floater (CavanKerry Press, 2008) and (CavanKerry Press, 2014). Her third collection, The Congress of Human Oddities, is forthcoming from Deerbrook Editions in 2015. She holds two MFAs--one in poetry, the other in theater, both from Sarah Lawrence College.

For more about Teresa, visit her website. And here's a beautiful example of her work, as featured by the Academy of American Poets.