Mary Karr

Mary Karr is an American poet and memoirist whose work helped reshape the contemporary American memoir as a literary form. Born in 1955 in Groves, Texas, she came up through the workshop tradition and earned an MFA from Goddard College before publishing her first poetry collection, Abacus, in 1987. She is the Peck Professor of English Literature at Syracuse University, where she has taught creative writing for decades. Karr's 1995 memoir The Liars' Club, which recounted her unstable East Texas childhood, became a critical and commercial landmark — spending more than a year on the New York Times bestseller list and frequently cited as one of the books that revived the memoir as a serious literary genre during the 1990s memoir boom. Her two subsequent memoirs, Cherry and Lit, continued the autobiographical sequence into her adolescence, her early literary life, her struggles with alcoholism, and her eventual conversion to Catholicism. As a poet she has published five collections including Viper Rum, Sinners Welcome, and Tropic of Squalor, work that combines plain Texas diction with classical formal control and recurring engagement with prayer, addiction, and the body. Her 2015 book The Art of Memoir distilled decades of teaching into a working craft guide that has become a standard text in creative-writing programs. Karr has won Guggenheim and PEN/Martha Albrand Award recognition, and her essays and reviews appear regularly in the New Yorker, the Atlantic, and Poetry. She remains one of the most visible American writers working across memoir and verse, and her influence is widely cited by the generation of memoirists who came up reading The Liars' Club in workshop.