Bio
CHUCK CARLISE was born in Canton, Ohio, on the first Flag Day of the Jimmy Carter Era and has lived in a dozen states and two continents since. He is the author of A Broken Escalator Still Isn’t the Stairs (Concrete Wolf Poetry Series) and Casual Insomniac (Bateau, “Boom Contest” winner). He is the recipient of the 2012 InPrint/Paul Verlaine Poetry Prize and his work has garnered six Pushcart Prize nominations, two Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Prizes, and inclusion in Best New Poets 2012. He has received fellowships or grants from the Mitchell Foundation, the Tin House Summer Writer’s Workshop, the University of Houston, Wildacres, and the Writer’s Colony at Dairy Hollow. His poems and essays appear in Southern Review, Pleiades, DIAGRAM, Quarterly West, Beloit Poetry Journal, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Southeast Review, and elsewhere.
He studied at Wittenberg University (BA, 1999) and the University of California at Davis (MA, 2003), where he was an editor for Swan Scythe Poetry Press for two years and was awarded the 2003 C.T. Wright Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets. In 2012, he completed his PhD in Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Houston, where he served as Non-Fiction Editor of Gulf Coast and as a departmental Graduate Representative for Poetry, as well as teaching courses in composition, creative writing, cultural studies, and literature. He has also served as a faculty member at UC-Santa Cruz, CTY, the Boldface Writer’s Conference, Writers in the Schools, and as Poet-in-Residence at the Lawrence (KS) Public Schools. Outside of academia, he spent several years in the non-profit sector, primarily as a community organizer in Portland, Oregon.
Since graduation in May 2012, he has split his time, teaching part time on the Core faculty of Merrill College at UC-Santa Cruz, and with Writers in the Schools in Portland.