Bio
SHORT BIO:
Kari Gunter-Seymour is the immediate past Poet Laureate of Ohio and an Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellowship recipient. Her poetry collections include All That Teethes Within (University Press of Kentucky 2026), Dirt Songs (EastOver Press, 2024) winner of the 2025 Bronze IPPY Award for Poetry, 2025 NYC Big Book Award, 2025 Feathered Quill Award, 2025 National Federation of Press Women Award, 2024 POTY Author of the Year Award and StoryTrade Award; Alone in the House of My Heart (Ohio University Swallow Press, 2022), winner of the 2024 Legacy Award, the 2023 Best Book Award, and finalist for the 2023 National Indie Excellence Award; and A Place So Deep Inside America It Can’t Be Seen (Sheila Na Gig Editions, 2020), winner of the 2020 Ohio Poet of the Year Award. A ninth generation Appalachian, she is the executive director of the Women of Appalachia Project and editor of its anthology series, Women Speak, finalist for the Next Generation Indie Book Award/Anthology. Gunter-Seymour holds writing workshops for incarcerated adults and women in recovery, is a retired instructor in the E.W. Scripps School of Journalism at Ohio University and the founder, curator, and host of "Spoken & Heard," a seasonal performance series featuring poets, writers, and musicians from across the country. She is the editor of I Thought I Heard A Cardinal Sing: Ohio’s Appalachian Voices, funded through the Academy of American Poets and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. She was selected to serve as a 2022 Dodge Poetry Festival Poet and is a Pillars of Prosperity Fellow for the Foundation for Appalachian Ohio. Her work has been featured in The New York Times, World Literature Today, American Book Review, Poem-a-Day and Katie Curic's Wake Up Call.
PRAISE FOR "ALL THAT TEETHES WITHIN:
“Gunter-Seymour’s powers of observation are keener than a single-edge razor blade fresh from the box. She diagnoses a nation’s sickness with a dozen pointed words. She is a fierce defender of her beloved Appalachia, whose ‘past is painted in coal’ and ‘struggles of endurance.’ She contains mountains.” —Chuck Reece, cofounder and editor in chief of Salvation South and founding editor in chief of The Bitter Southerner
“Each gripping poem, each gorgeous, brilliant image, serves as both a dirge and an ode, feels like holding ‘a snow angel, trapped in its final thrash,’ like wandering, lost, in ‘a graveyard / of strangled roots.’ These poems held me the way that I have learned to hold grief—the terrible seed that we bury and unearth, that morphs and never leaves us as the world, and life, goes on.”
—Joan Kwon Glass, author of Daughter of Three Gone Kingdoms and Night Swim
“Kari Gunter-Seymour’s stunning elegy to her sister speaks to the singular intimacy
between siblings and to the singular ache of living on after a beloved sibling dies. I felt
a pain in my jaw reading these brave, clear-minded poems that are as much about a
lost sister as they are about the communal losses that contributed to her death. All That
Teethes Within is a nuanced, extraordinary book from a poet at the height of her talents.”
—Idra Novey, author of Soon and Wholly: Poems
“Beautiful and searing. An expansive elegy for a lost sister, one who never found a
gentle path to travel or a comfortable way to be in the world but who was loved nevertheless.
Alongside their wordplay and wicked sense of humor, these poems convey a
visceral pain and take a steel-hard look at how grief transforms us. Gunter-Seymour’s
metaphors continually dazzle and awaken, attuned to seasons, birds, and ‘May’s milk
moon spilling its creamery.’ The poems offer no easy consolations but instead confront
something more valuable: how to live with our suffering after unconsolable loss and
how to survive when one we love ends their own life. All That Teethes Within is an essential
book by one of our most true poets, and I read it through and again with gratitude for
Gunter-Seymour’s strength and vision.”
—Jesse Graves, author of Merciful Days: Poems
PRAISE FOR "DIRT SONGS:
A noteworthy and insightful poetic portrait. - Kirkus Review
In Dirt Songs Kari Gunter-Seymour proves she is at the top of her game by evoking both the wild energy and lustful passion of youth and the regrets such indulgences oft engender later in life. Other poems in the collection beautifully capture the natural world of Appalachia through precise language and fresh imagery. The entire collection creates magic and meaning both through the words themselves and in the spaces that lie between the lines. Which is what you would expect of the Ohio Poet Laureate: a superb collection.
Donna Meredith, Southern Literary Review
A modern-day Joanie Appleseed, Gunter-Seymour collects poems and carries them to poemless places, carefully situating them in spaces where they can flourish. In the new collection Dirt Songs, the latest collection in her own growing body of work, she takes a deep dive into the secrets of the soil, unearthing buried memories and the histories of those who have come before her.
Jessica Manack, Mom Egg Review
PRAISE FOR "ALONE IN THE HOUSE OF MY HEART:" (2024 Legacy Award, 2023 ABF Best Book Award and finalist for the National Indie Excellence Award)
A breathtaking, artful set of poems on loss, family, place, and memory. - Kirkus Starred Review
We reckon that nine generations in Appalachia is long enough for a place to get in the bones of a family, and that kinheritance has marked Kari Gunter-Seymour with an intuitive feel for one of America’s most isolated and peculiar regions. - Matt Sutherland, Foreword Reviews
These poems are delicately nuanced and so hard-edged, so unique, they can make you catch your breath. - Hephzibah Roskelly, World Literature Today
Gunter-Seymour’s talent shines like a diamond in this collection: solid, clear, sparkling.
Donna Meredith, Southern Literary Review
“The poems of Kari Gunter-Seymour’s Alone in the House of My Heart are ragged with loss, yet sustained by all they take in through the senses, from Mother’s ‘cat-eye glasses, Pentecostal bun,’ whispering ‘loud enough / for the soprano section to hear,’ to ‘collards and heirloom tomatoes / strapped to stakes like sinners / begging the lash.’ As the details accrue, they generate a place conjured by memory, the Appalachia of the speaker’s upbringing, where she nested in the loft of the barn in the hay, ‘spicy sweet,’ and where canned fruit cocktail is the ultimate delicacy. Still, it is a place sowed with the seeds of its own undoing—fracking, coal dust, addiction. Language itself is somehow larger even than the consciousness that creates it, more expansive than right and wrong, and ‘free of the splintery / cold of our foolish selves,’ poetry, which here is synonymous with hard-won love.”
—Diane Seuss, author of frank: sonnets READ ADDITIONAL COMMENTS
PRAISE FOR "A PLACE SO DEEP INSIDE AMERICA IT CAN'T BE SEEN:" (2020 Ohio Poet of the Year Award)
"Kari Gunter-Seymour's A Place So Deep Inside America It Can’t Be Seen does what journalists and J.D. Vance failed to do: it provides an intimate look at a landscape and family from within Appalachia while recognizing that one story does not the region make. That said, the connections Gunter-Seymour creates throughout her book weave the Appalachian and American together, providing a rare glimpse of what unity might look like."
- Jessica Cory CLICK HERE TO READ THE FULL REVIEW
Kari Gunter-Seymour is a poet whose work resounds with candid, lyrical poems about Appalachia’s social and geographical afflictions and affirmations. History, culture, and community shape the physical and personal landscapes of Gunter-Seymour’s native southeastern Ohio soil, scarred by Big Coal and fracking, while food insecurity and Big Pharma leave their marks on the region’s people. A musicality of language swaddles each poem in hope and a determination to endure. Her second full length collection, Alone in the House of My Heart (Ohio university Swallow Press 2022) offers what only art can: a series of thought-provoking images that evoke such a clear sense of place that it’s familiar to anyone, regardless of where they call home. Purchase HERE.
ADDITIONAL INFORMATION:
Gunter-Seymour is a ninth generation Appalachian and editor of "I Thought I Heard A Cardinal Sing, Ohio's Appalachian Voices," funded by the Academy of American Poets and Andrew W. Mellon Foundation through a 2021 Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellowship grant. She also edits the Women of Appalachia Project™ anthology series, "Women Speak," volumes 1-12 and "Essentially Athens Ohio," an anthology focused on landmarks, tales and experiences of those living in or deeply connected to Athens county. She holds a B.F.A. in graphic design and an M.A. in commercial photography and is a retired instructor in the E.W. Scripps School of Journalism at Ohio University. A poem she wrote in support of families living in poverty in Athens County, OH, went viral and has been seen by over 100,000 people, resulting in thousands of dollars donated to her local food pantry. She is the winner of the 2022 New Ohio Review/Moveable Writing Contest and the 2021 Lascaux Prize in Poetry. She is the immediate past Poet Laureate of Ohio. She served three terms, a total of six years.
Her work was selected by former US Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey to be included in the PBS American Portrait crowdsourced poem, Remix: For My People. Her poetry has been featured in The New York Times, World Literature Today, Verse Daily, and appears in many fine publications. Her chapbook “Serving” is available from Crisis Chronicles Press. She holds workshops for incarcerated men, women, teens, and women in recovery housing.
She is the founder, curator and host of Spoken & Heard, a seasonal performance series featuring poets, writers and musicians from across the country, funded by the Ohio Arts Council and presented by Sheila Na Gig Editions, Inc.
Her award winning photography has been published nationally in The Sun Magazine, World Literature Today, Light Journal, Looking at Appalachia, Storm Cellar Quarterly, Anthology of Appalachian Writers, Vine Leaves Journal and Appalachian Review.
Gunter-Seymour is the founder/executive director of the “Women of Appalachia Project,” an arts organization she created to address discrimination directed at women from the Appalachian region by encouraging participation from women artists (spoken word and fine art ) of diverse backgrounds, ages and experiences to come together, embrace the stereotype, show the whole woman; beyond the superficial factors people use to judge her. (www.womenofappalachia.com).
