Kai Carlson-Wee | |
|---|---|
 American Poet | |
| Born | May 20, 1982 Minneapolis, Minnesota |
| Education | University of Minnesota, University of Wisconsin, University of Oxford |
| Notable work | 'RAIL', 'Riding the Highline' |
| Website | www.kaicarlsonwee.com |
Kai Carlson-Wee is an American poet and filmmaker. [1] He is the author of the poetry collection RAIL, published by BOA Editions in 2018. [2] He is a Jones Lecturer in creative writing at Stanford University. [3]
Carlson-Wee was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, the son of Lutheran pastors. [4] He has two younger brothers, poet Anders Carlson-Wee [5] and Olaf Carlson-Wee, entrepreneur and the founder of Polychain Capital. [6] After graduating from High School in Moorhead, Minnesota, Carlson-Wee moved to San Diego to pursue a career as a professional rollerblader. [4] He attended Grossmont Community College in El Cajon, before attending the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, and St. Catherine's College at Oxford University, where he studied Romantic Poetry. [7] During his time in college, he struggled with mental health issues and was prescribed mood stabilizers and anti-psychotic medication, stating that after seven months of treatment, "my thoughts returned to normal and I was able to read again." [7] Following college, Carlson-Wee traveled extensively throughout the United States, train hopping, hitchhiking, road tripping, and hiking in the North Cascades. [7] He also traveled throughout Europe and lived at the Shakespeare and Company bookstore in Paris. In interviews, he has stated that traveling became the subject matter of much of his writing and filmmaking. [8]
Carlson-Wee received an MFA in Poetry from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2011. [9] He was awarded a Wallace Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University in 2011, and a Jones Lectureship in Poetry in 2013. [3] In 2014 he won the Editor's Prize from The Missouri Review, [10] and in 2023 he received a Pushcart Prize. Carlson-Wee's writing has been published in The Kenyon Review, Tin House, Ploughshares, The Academy of American Poets, Literary Hub, and The Southern Review. [3] His photography has been featured in Narrative Magazine . With his brother Anders, he has co-authored the chapbooks Mercy Songs and Two-Headed Boy. [11]
His debut collection of poems, RAIL, was published by BOA Editions in 2018, and was praised for its "authentic voice" [12] and "gritty" depictions of life on the road. [13] In the foreword to the book, Nick Flynn describes it as "biblical" and compares it to works by Larry Levis and Sam Shephard. [2] Publishers Weekly praised the book for its "un-performative americana" and moments of "brutal lyric beauty". [14] Campell McGrath named Carlson-Wee a "worthy inheritor" of "the great American bardic tradition", comparing him to Walt Whitman and Jack Kerouac.
His documentary film, Riding the Highline, [15] received the Special Jury Prize at the Napa Valley Film Festival, [5] the Audience Choice Award at the Arizona International Film Festival, [16] and the Shoestring Award at the Rochester International Film Festival. [17] The film follows Carlson-Wee and his brother hopping freight trains on the Burlington Highline route from Minneapolis, Minnesota to Wenatchee, Washington.
Carlson-Wee's writing explores themes of travel, mental health, and the myth of the American West. [18] He writes in a narrative lyric mode and employs long lines and anapestic meter to approximate the rhythm of a train. [19] Carlson-Wee has said he often writes while traveling, [18] and his poems are composed of "loose fragments" scribbled in his journals. [7] Carlson-Wee stated he's been influenced by the imagist poets, particularly the poet Robert Bly, who described his debut collection as "strong and inspired". [20] He has also been influenced by the dirty realism writers of the 1980s, [21] and by photographers such as Alec Soth and Michael Brodie. [22] He has been compared to Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen in his tales of "nomadic vagabonds" and "unmoored drifters searching for a home"., [23] [24] and his work has been praised as an authentic depiction of rural lives and stories [14] [24]
| Year | Honor | Medium | Organization |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2023 | Pushcart Prize | Poetry | Pushcart Press |
| 2018 | Walter E. Dakin Fellowship | Writing | The Sewanee Writer's Workshop [25] |
| 2018 | Lynda Hull Memorial Prize | Poetry | Crazyhorse Magazine [26] |
| 2018 | Finalist for Balconies Prize | Poetry | Austin Community College [20] |
| 2017 | Best New Poets | Poetry | New England Review [27] |
| 2017 | Shoestring Award | Film | Rochester International Film Festival [17] |
| 2017 | Winter Story Contest (2nd Place) | Writing | Narrative Magazine [28] |
| 2016 | Award for Creative Achievement | Film | Arizona International Film Festival [8] |
| 2015 | Special Jury Prize for Innovation | Film | Napa Valley Film Fest [8] |
| 2015 | MacDowell Fellowship | Writing | MacDowell [29] |
| 2014 | Editor's Prize, The Missouri Review | Writing | The Missouri Review [10] |
| 2013- Present | Jones Lectureship | Writing | Stanford University [3] |
| 2011- 2013 | Wallace Stegner Fellowship | Writing | Stanford University [3] |
| 2012 | Dorothy Sargent Rosenburg Prize | Poetry | Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Memorial Fund [30] [31] |
The Pulitzer Prize for Poetry is one of the seven American Pulitzer Prizes awarded annually for Letters, Drama, and Music. It was first presented in 1922, and is given for a distinguished volume of original verse by an American author, published during the preceding calendar year.
The Griffin Poetry Prize is Canada's poetry award. It was founded in 2000 by businessman and philanthropist Scott Griffin.
The Duff Cooper Prize is a literary prize awarded annually for the best work of history, biography, political science or occasionally poetry, published in English or French. The prize was established in honour of Duff Cooper, a British diplomat, Cabinet member and author. The prize was first awarded in 1956 to Alan Moorehead for his Gallipoli. At present, the winner receives a first edition copy of Duff Cooper's autobiography Old Men Forget and a cheque for £5,000.
Saul Stacey Williams is an American rapper, singer, songwriter, musician, poet, writer, and actor. He is known for his blend of poetry and alternative hip hop, and for his lead roles in the 1998 independent film Slam and the 2013 jukebox musical Holler If Ya Hear Me.
Nick Flynn is an American writer, playwright, and poet.
The Cholmondeley Awards are annual awards for poetry given by the Society of Authors in the United Kingdom. Awards honour distinguished poets, from a fund endowed by the Dowager Marchioness of Cholmondeley in 1966. Since 1991 the award has been made to four poets each year, to the total value of £8000.
The Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize, established in 1986, is awarded annually to the best collection of poetry by a resident of British Columbia, Canada.
Bob Hicok is an American poet.
The PEN/Malamud Award and Memorial Reading honors "excellence in the art of the short story", and is awarded annually by the PEN/Faulkner Foundation. The selection committee is composed of PEN/Faulkner directors and representatives of Bernard Malamud's literary executors. The award was first given in 1988.
Graywolf Press is an independent, non-profit publisher located in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Graywolf Press publishes fiction, non-fiction, and poetry.
David Mura is an American author, poet, novelist, playwright, critic and performance artist whose writings explore the themes of race, identity and history. In 2018, Mura has published a book on creative writing, A Stranger’s Journey: Race, Identity & Narrative Craft in Writing, in which he argues for a more inclusive and expansive definition of craft.
The Best New Poets series consists of annual poetry anthologies, each containing fifty poems from poets without a previously published collection. The first edition of the series appeared in 2005, and was published, as all later editions have been, by Samovar Press. In 2006, the University of Virginia Press began distributing the anthology.
BOA Editions, Ltd. is an American independent, non-profit literary publishing company located in Rochester, New York, founded in 1976 by the late poet, editor and translator, A. Poulin, Jr., and publishing poetry, fiction, and nonfiction.
The Frost Place is a museum and nonprofit educational center for poetry located at Robert Frost's former home on Ridge Road in Franconia, New Hampshire, United States. The property was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1976.
Kevin Coval is an American poet. Coval is a Chicago-based writer who is known for exploring topics such as race, hip-hop culture, Chicago history, and Jewish-American identity in his work. He is also known for his appearances in four seasons of the Peabody Award-winning television series Def Poetry Jam on HBO.
Ali Blythe is a Canadian poet and editor. He is author of a trilogy of books exploring trans-poetics: Twoism (2015), Hymnswitch (2019), and Stedfast (2023), two of which were finalists for the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize. In 2017, he was recipient of an honour of distinction for the Dayne Ogilvie Prize for LGBTQ writers.
David Campos (poet) is an American poet, writer, and producer of video poetry from California. His debut collection, Furious Dusk, won the 2014 Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize from Letras Latinas, the literary initiative at the University of Notre Dame's Institute for Latino Studies (ILS).
Atticus is an anonymous poet. He is the author of five books, including The Dark Between Stars and The Truth About Magic, both of which are New York Times Best Sellers.
Leila Mottley is an American novelist and poet. She is The New York Times bestselling author of Nightcrawling, which was a nominated for numerous awards, including the Booker Prize, making her the youngest author to have been nominated for the award. In 2018, at age 16, she was named the Youth Poet Laureate of Oakland, California.
Anders Carlson-Wee is an American poet. His first collection, The Low Passions, was published by W. W. Norton & Company in 2019. Norton published his second collection, Disease of Kings, in 2023.
{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link)