Marilyn Kallet was born in Montgomery, Alabama, and grew up in New York, thus inspiring the theme of tension between North and South that often appears in her poetry. She attended Tufts University where she earned a B.A. in English and French in 1968. She also attended Sorbonne Université where she received a degree in Cours de civilisation in 1967. Later, she received her M.A. (1976) and her Ph.D. (1978) in comparative literature from Rutgers. She is the author of 18 books, including the 2018 poetry collection, How Our Bodies Learned. Other recent poetry volumes include: The Love That Moves Me; Packing Light: New and Selected Poems; Circe, After Hour. She also translated Disenchanted City, by Chantal Bizzini, co-translated with B. Anderson and D. Jackson; The Big Game, a translation of Surrealist by poet Benjamin Péret, 2011, and Last Love Poems of Paul Eluard.
Kallet is a Knoxville Poet Laureate and professor emerita of English at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville where she has taught for 37 years. Since 2009, she has lead poetry workshops and writing residencies in Auvillar, France for the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Among other honors, she has won the Tennessee Arts Commission Literary Fellowship in poetry and was inducted into the East Tennessee Literary Hall of Fame in poetry in 2005, the Knoxville YWCA named her Woman of Achievement in the Arts in 2000, and she was awarded an Honorary Woodrow Wilson Fellowship. She has performed her poetry on campuses and in theaters across the United States and abroad.
