Kerri Webster

Kerri Webster is an American poet. She was a recipient of a 2011 Whiting Award.^[1] She currently teaches at Boise State University.

Life

Kerri Webster was born in 1971 and raised in Idaho. She is the author of two books of poetry and two chapbooks. She received her MFA from Indiana University, and was a writer in residence in the MFA program at Washington University in St. Louis (2016-2010). For 10 years, Webster worked as a Writer in the Schools, conducting weekly creative writing workshops for students.

Books

• We Do Not Eat Our Hearts Alone 978-0820327730

Elena Karina Byrne said of We Do Not Eat Our Hearts Alone, “With gorgeous maneuvers in language, Webster multiplies image, subject and persona, the way a scientist splits atoms.”

Carl Phillips: “Taking on ‘our whole silly empire of sorrow,’ in which the holy is ever vanishing and the body—eager for more than ‘to be entered only metaphorically’—is always trembling, Webster’s poems announce an authentically original voice of astonishing intellectual and formal range, refreshing and disarming in its frankness. The vision here is fierce, intimate, and tireless in its determination to see this life squarely: ‘do the sacred miss the profane?’ Yes, Webster suggests—but if so, then it is also the case that the body is ‘an altar on which you can only lay down so much.’ Webster makes of this dilemma a meditation that ravishes with its sheer nerve and everywhere persuades by its commitment to lyric beauty, intellectual rigor, and to the power—at once rescuing and mutinous—of language itself.”

• Grand and Arsenal 978-1609380915

Of Grand and Arsenal, Lisa Russ Spaar wrote: “Obsessed as she was in her first book with time, with fetish and wunderkammer cataloging, with the blur between the sacred and the secular, Webster carries her flood subject matter into new turf in Grand & Arsenal: the political and the erotic, the praised and the indicted, the oracular and the silent.”

Nikky Finney: “Kerri Webster’s voice is oracular, new, and legendary, full of land and weather. Grand and Arsenal rains forth like a liniment, painting the bald-faced human. Her penchant for opposites reminds us that difference is not a contrary thing but first cousin to who we are. When we read this new luminous voice we are led Upriver. This is Big poetry, a very special book where ‘the gods come down to the banks to drink.”

Chapbooks

• Rowing Through Fog (2003) Winner of the Poetry Society of America Chapbook Fellowship, Published by the Poetry Society of America
• Psalm Project (2009) Published by Albion Books

Journals

Webster’s poems have appeared in numerous journals including American Poet, Antioch Review, At Length, Better, BOAAT, Boston Review, Denver Quarterly, Gettysburg Review, Guernica, Gulf Coast, Indiana Review, Kenyon Review, Poetry, and Washington Square Review.

Awards

• Whiting Award, 2011
• Iowa Poetry Prize, Jane Mead, judge, 2011
• Lucille Medwick Award from the Poetry Society of America, Nikky Finney, judge, 2013
• Crazyhorse Lynda Hull Memorial Poetry Prize, Dean Young, judge, 2006
• Idaho Commission on the Arts Fellowships, 2004 and 2016
• Poetry Society Chapbook Fellowship, Carl Phillips, judge, 2003

External links

• Author Website
• Poetry Society of America
• NPR National Poetry Month
• Slope online journal, Lapsed Hymns
• Poetry Society of America Lucile Medwick Memorial Award
• Poets.org
• Whiting Awards
• LA Review of Books
• Boise Weekly
• We Do Not Eat Our Hearts Alone, Kerri Webster, Amazon.com
• Grand and Arsenal, Kerri Webster, Amazon.com
• At Length, Atomic Clock
• The Boston Review Hotel Eidetic, Hotel Voluptuary, Hotel Famish
• Boaat Press, The Spinster Project, Of Deborah
• Guernica magazine, Corpse Flower
• At Length, The Night Grove

References