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 the poetry collection, In One Version of the Story (New Issues Poetry & Prose, 2016), as well as two chapbooks, 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 the  Best New Poets anthology in both 2012 and 2014.  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, and has spoken or read in dozens of venues, including as the Keynote Speaker at the Sigma Tau Delta annual meeting (High Plains Region) in Hays, Kansas.  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.  Since then, he has served on writing and literature faculties at UC-Santa Cruz, University of Houston, UC-Davis, Westminster College, Southern New Hampshire University, and Grand Valley State University, as well as teaching at the Boldface Writer’s Conference, the John’s Hopkins Center for Talented Youth (CTY), Writers in the Schools, and as Poet-in-Residence at Fort Hays State University, Wittenberg University, and the Lawrence (KS) Public Schools.  Outside of academia, he spent several years in the non-profit sector, primarily as an activist and community organizer in Portland, Oregon.

He is currently at work on a new volume of poems and multiple chapbooks, as well as a memoire of his years on the Greyhound Buslines.  In the fall of 2022, he accepted a position as Assistant Professor of English at Ashland University, teaching undergraduate literature and creative writing, as well as teaching graduate students in the Ashland MFA, and directing the Ashland Poetry Press.

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