Carol Potter

Carol Potter’s most recent book of poems, What Happens Next is Anyone’s Guess, was awarded the 2021 Pacific Coast Series Award from Beyond Baroque Books. Of What Happens Next is Anyone’s Guess, Ellen Dore Watson writes:

The first three poems in this book will tell you why you need to read it entire. Carol Potter’s imagination is positively athletic. Muscular, agile. These are poems in which “satisfying” and “close to ruin” can reside in the same moment. This is a poet who can also strike you with quiet recognition: “Sometimes you just need to rest your face.” Check out the love poem “Stealth, or A Sweet Bit of Stealing.” Potter brings playfulness to every poem, no matter how dead serious. One might wonder—amidst all these shenanigans—how does she also manage to be wise? Such is her gift.

—Ellen Doré Watson, author of pray me stay eager

Other books include Some Slow Bees, which winner of the 2014 Field Poetry Prize from Oberlin College Press, Otherwise Obedient (Red Hen Press, 2007), a finalist in the Lambda LGBT awards for 2007, and Short History of Pets which won the 1999 Cleveland State Poetry Center Award, and the Balcones Award. Two previous books were published by Alice James Books, Upside Down in The Dark (I995) and Before We Were Born (1990).

Publications include poems in The Massachusetts Review, The New England Review, Poetry, American Poetry Review, The Iowa Review, Hotel Amerika, The Los Angeles Review, Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, Poet Lore, Sinister Wisdom, The Kenyon Review, and many other journals.

Potter’s work has also appeared in numerous anthologies including The Pushcart Prize XXVI: Best of the Small Presses, December 2001, and most recently in The Road Taken, an anthology of contemporary Vermont poets.

Other awards a grant from the Vermont Council of Arts, 2019, a Pushcart Prize in 2001, The 2015 Ekphrasis Poetry Award, The 2015 Northampton Arts Biennial Poetry Contest, The New Letters Award for Poetry in 1990, the Tom McAfee Discovery Award from The Missouri Review, and three Massachusetts Council of the Arts Awards, and the 2004 dA Center for the Arts Poetry Award. Potter was also the writer in residence at the Thurber House in April of 2003. She has had residencies at Yaddo, MacDowell, Millay Colony for the Arts, Cummington Community of the Arts, Valparaiso in Mojacar, Spain, Villa Montalvo, and Centrum.