Mary Karr

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Mary Karr (born January 16, 1955) is an American poet, essayist, and memoirist from East Texas.

With the introduction of her best-selling book The Liars' Club, she came to fame in 1995.

She is the Jesse Truesdell Peck Professor of English Literature at Syracuse University.

Personal life

Karr was born in Groves, Texas, on January 16, 1955, and she lived there until she moved to Los Angeles in 1972. Karr started at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota, where she studied for two years and met poet Etheridge Knight, one of her first mentors. Karr later attended and graduated from Goddard College, where she studied with poets Robert Hass and Stephen Dobyns.

Karr was married to poet Michael Milburn for 13 years. She had a friendship with author David Foster Wallace at some point. Karr spoke out about Wallace's abusive behavior, which included years of stalking, throwing a coffee table at her, and harrassering her five-year-old son.

Although converting to Catholicism, Karr supports beliefs that are contradictory with Catholic Church teaching: abortion she supports abortion, and she has advocated for women's ordination to the priesthood. Since age 12, Karr has described herself as a feminist.

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Career

Karr's 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 explores her deeply troubled childhood, most of which was spent in a gritty industrial section of Southeast Texas in the 1960s. Karr 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 a second memoir, Cherry (2000), about her late adolescence and early womanhood.

A third memoir, Lit: A Memoir, which she says details "my journey from blackbelt sinner and lifelong agnostic to unlikely Catholic," came out in November 2009. The memoir describes Karr's time as an alcoholic and the salvation she found in her conversion to Catholicism. She describes herself as a cafeteria Catholic.

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 essays. Karr has published five volumes of poetry: Abacus (Wesleyan University Press, CT, 1987, in its New Poets series), The Devil's Tour (New Directions NY, 1993, an original TPB), Viper Rum (New Directions NY, 1998, an original TPB), Sinners Welcome (HarperCollins, NY, 2006), and Tropic of Squalor (HarperCollins, NY, 2018). Her poems have appeared in major literary magazines such as Poetry, The New Yorker, and The Atlantic Monthly.

Karr's Pushcart Award-winning essay, "Against Decoration", was originally published in the quarterly review Parnassus (1991) and later reprinted in Viper Rum. In "Against Decoration", Karr took a stand in favor of content over poetic style. She argued emotions need to be directly expressed and clarity should be a watch-word: characters are too obscure, the presented physical world is often "foggy" (that is imprecise), references are "showy" (both non-germane and overused), metaphors overshadow expected meaning, and techniques of language (polysyllables, archaic words, intricate syntax, "yards of adjectives") only "slow a reader's understanding".

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

In May 2015, Karr served as the commencement speaker at the 161st commencement for Syracuse University.

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Awards and honors

• 1989 Whiting Award
• 1995 PEN/Martha Albrand Award for The Liars' Club
• 2005 Guggenheim Fellowship