# Kelly Cherry

Kelly Cherry (December 21, 1940 – March 18, 2022) was an American novelist, poet, essayist, professor, and literary critic and a former Poet Laureate of Virginia (2010–2012). She was the author of more than 30 books, including the poetry collections Songs for a Soviet Composer, Death and Transfiguration, Rising Venus and The Retreats of Thought. Her short fiction was reprinted in The Best American Short Stories, Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards, The Pushcart Prize, and New Stories from the South, and won a number of awards.

## Life

Cherry was born in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, to J. Milton, a violinist and music professor, and Mary Spooner, a violinist and writer. She moved to Ithaca, New York, at age 5, and Chesterfield County, Virginia, at age 9.
She received her bachelor's degree from Mary Washington College in 1961 and an MFA in 1967 from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. She married Jonathan Silver in 1966 and divorced him in 1969. She later married Walter Burke Davis III, a writer, journalist and bookseller.
Cherry died on March 18, 2022, at the age of 81. The editors of storySouth dedicated the magazine's spring 2022 issue to her for her support of "all the little magazines."

## Career
### Early career

Cherry graduated from the University of Mary Washington in 1961, did graduate work at the University of Virginia in philosophy as a Du Pont Fellow, and received a Master of Fine Arts from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. After working in publishing for some years, she accepted a position at Southwest Minnesota State College. She began teaching at the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1977. Cherry later became the Eudora Welty Professor Emerita of English and Evjue-Bascom Professor Emerita in the Humanities at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

### Later career

Cherry retired in 1999 and in retirement held chairs and distinguished writer positions at a number of universities, including the University of Alabama in Huntsville (Eminent Scholar), Colgate University, Mercer University, Atlantic Center for the Arts, and Hollins University.
A resident of Halifax, Virginia, she was named the state's Poet Laureate by Governor Bob McDonnell in July 2010. She succeeded Claudia Emerson in this post (Poet Laureate of Virginia, 2008–2010).

## Literary themes and styles

Cherry's poetry frequently focused on issues related to philosophy and language, and has been described as trying to "discover within the art of poetry methods and procedures identical to, or closely analogous with, those of a science or a rigorous formal philosophy." Or as Cherry described it, "the becoming-aware of abstraction in real life--since, in order to abstract, you must have something to abstract from."
Within her novels, the abstract notions of morality become her focus: "My novels deal with moral dilemmas and the shapes they create as they reveal themselves in time. My poems seek out the most suitable temporal or kinetic structure for a given emotion." As described in Contemporary Authors, Cherry "manages to capture, in very readable stories, the indecisiveness and mute desperation of life in the twentieth century."
From the beginning of her career, Cherry wrote both formal verse and free verse. According to the citation preceding her receipt of the James G. Hanes Poetry Prize by the Fellowship of Southern Writers in 1989, "Her poetry is marked by a firm intellectual passion, a reverent desire to possess the genuine thought of our century, historical, philosophical, and scientific, and a species of powerful ironic wit which is allied to rare good humor." Reviewing Relativity, Patricia Goedicke noted in Three Rivers Poetry Journal that "her familiarity with the demands and pressures of traditional patterns has resulted...in an expansion and deepening of her poetic resources, a carefully textured over- and underlay of image, meaning and diction." Mark Harris felt that Cherry's "ability to sustain a narrative by clustering and repeating images [lends] itself to longer forms, and 'A Bird's Eye View of Einstein,' the longest poem in [Relativity], is an example of Cherry at her poetic best." Reviewing Cherry's collection, Death and Transfiguration, Patricia Gabilondo wrote in The Anglican Theological Review that "the abstract prose poem 'Requiem' that closes this book...translates personal loss into the historical and universal, providing an occasion for philosophical meditation on the mystery of suffering and the need for transcendence in a post-Holocaust world that seems to offer none. Moving through the terrors of nihilism and doubt, Cherry, in a poem that deftly alternates between the philosophically abstract and the image's graphic force, gives us an intellectually honest and deeply moving vision of our relation to each other's suffering and of God's relation to humanity's 'memory of pain'."

## Teaching positions in retirement

* Rivers-Coffey Distinguished Chair, Appalachian State University
* Louis D. Rubin, Jr., Writer-in-Residence, Hollins University
* Master Artist, Atlantic Center for the Arts
* Ferrol A. Sams, Jr., Distinguished Chair in English, Mercer University
* NEH Visiting professor in the Humanities, Colgate University
* Eminent Scholar, University of Alabama in Huntsville, 1999-2004

## While at the University of Wisconsin

* Wyndham Robertson Writer-in-Residence, Hollins University
* Distinguished Professor, Rhodes College
* Full Professor and Distinguished Writer-in-Residence, Western Washington University

## Other positions and posts include

* Member, Electorate, Cathedral of St. John the Divine, NYC (five-year term beginning 2009; extended to 2016; now Electorate Emeritus)
* Associated Writing Programs Board of Directors (1990–93)
* Discipline Advisory Committee for Fulbright Awards (1991–94)
* Advisory Editor, Shenandoah (1988–92)
* Contributing Editor, The Hollins Critic (1996–present)
* Contributing Editor, The Smart Set (2015–present)