Liars' Club (Karr) - Author Bio

Author Bio
• Birth—January 16, 1955
• Where—Groves, Texas, USA
• Education—M.F.A., Goddard College
• Awards—(see below)
• Currently—teaches English at Syracuse University.


Mary Karr is an American poet, essayist, and memoirist. She rose to fame in 1995 with the publication of her bestselling memoir The Liars' Club. She is the Jesse Truesdell Peck Professor of English Literature at Syracuse University and, in 2015, was chosen to deliver the commencement speech at the university.

Memoirs
Her memoir The Liars' Club, published in 1995, was a New York Times bestseller for over a year and was named one of the year's best books. It delves vividly and often humorously into her deeply troubled childhood, most of which was spent in a gritty industrial section of Southeast Texas in the 1960s. She was encouraged to write her personal history by her friend Tobias Wolff, but has said she only took up the project when her marriage fell apart.

She followed the book with another memoir, Cherry (2000), about her late adolescence and early womanhood.

A third memoir Lit details her "journey from blackbelt sinner and lifelong agnostic to unlikely Catholic," came out in 2009. She writes about her time as an alcoholic and the salvation she found in her conversion to Catholicism. She does, however, describe herself as a cafeteria Catholic.

In 2015 Karr published The Art of Memoir. Based on her writing class syllabus at Syracuse, the book is aimed at novice writers yet may also appeal to the general public for its humor and for its insights into the writing process. The book includes an extensive list of Karr's recommended memoirs in the appendix.

Poetry and essays on poetry
Karr won a 1989 Whiting Award for her poetry. She was a Guggenheim Fellow in poetry in 2005 and has won Pushcart prizes for both her poetry and her essays. Karr has published four volumes of poetry: Abacus (1987), The Devil's Tour (1993), Viper Rum (1998), and Sinners Welcome (2006). Her poems have appeared in major literary magazines such as Poetry, New Yorker, and Atlantic Monthly.

Karr's Pushcart Award winning essay, "Against Decoration." was published in the quarterly review Parnassus (1991). The essay argues for content over poetic style—insisting that emotions need to be expressed directly and with clarity. She criticized the use of obscure characters, imprecise or "foggy" descriptions of the physical world, and "showy, over-used references. She also holds that abstruse language—polysyllables, archaic words, intricate syntax, "yards of adjectives"—serve only as an obstacle to readers' understanding.

Karr directly criticized well-known, well-connected, and award-winning poets such as James Merrill, Amy Clampitt, Vijay Seshadri, and Rosanna Warren (daughter of Pulitzer Prize winner Robert Penn Warren). Karr favors controlled elegance to create transcendent poetic meaning out of not-quite-ordinary moments, presenting James Merrill's "Charles on Fire" as a successful example.

Another essay, "Facing Altars: Poetry and Prayer," was published in Poetry (2005). Karr tells of her move from agnostic alcoholic to baptized Catholic of the decidedly "cafeteria" kind, yet one who prays twice daily with loud fervor from her "foxhole." In the essay Karr argues that poetry and prayer arise from the same sources within us.

Personal life
In the 90s, Karr dated David Foster Wallace, who once tried to push her out of a moving car.

Awards and honors
1989 - Whiting Award
1995 - PEN/Martha Albrand Award for The Liars' Club
2005 - Guggenheim Fellowship. (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 9/30/2015.)