Kristi Carter

Kristi Carter’s poems have appeared in publications including Alyss , Gertrude, So to Speak, poemmemoirstory (now Nelle), CALYX, Nimrod, Naugatuck River Review, North Carolina Literary Review, Not Somewhere Else But Here: A Contemporary Anthology of Women and Place (Sundress Publications), and Hawaii Review amongst others.

In literature, art, and life, she is deeply invested in depictions and subversions of motherhood (and daughterhood), mother-daughter dynamics and tropes, sexual politics and agencies, LGBTQ experiences, embodiment, memory, heritage, history, music, myth, violence, and trauma.

Her scholarly and poetic work examines of the intersection of gender and intergenerational trauma in 20th Century poetics. Her fields of interest include trauma narratives, trauma studies via gender studies and intersectionality, and most subfields of study tangential to these, with specific interest on agency and gender.

Scholarship projects of late include an essay on the exploration and creation of feminist perspectives on motherhood alongside examples from 20th and 21st century poetry that extend women’s agency through complex portrayals of mother-daughter relationships, and by way of this, cultivate independent but related constructions of subjectivity for mothers and daughters. In addition, and closely related, she has done research on depictions of motherhood in confessional poetry and the critical scholarship as a mode of containment of those depictions. As a trauma scholar, she has also recently explored the cultural and individual traumas caused by war, with specific focus on the issues within American culture during WWII. Specifically, her analysis is funneled through the poetry of marginalized writers who thusly offer a compounded interpretation of trauma based on their experiences as both American citizens and as individuals who have been oppressed.

Like many scholars and writers, Carter has been teaching for some time now, with specific interest in aims to engage students in an interdisciplinary approach to feminist literary theory and the works of feminist poets through critical and creative discourses. Whether composition, literature, theory, cultural analysis, or gender studies, her teaching aims to motivate students to form tangible and relevant applications to their lives with the skills they build while working with her.