Mary Karr is an award-winning poet, essayist, songwriter, and memoirist from East Texas. She first gained attention for her controversial Pushcart Award-winning essay, Against Decoration, in which she took aim at excessive verbal ornament in poetry. She rose to fame in 1995 with the publication of her bestselling memoir, The Liars' Club, which documented her hardscrabble Texas childhood, kick-started a memoir revolution, and won nonfiction prizes from PEN and the Texas Institute of Letters. She followed up The Liars' Club with two more bestselling memoirs and in 2015, released the bestselling The Art of Memoir.
However, Karr is best-known for her poetry. She has written five critically acclaimed poetry collections to date, along the way receiving a Whiting Writer's Award, an NEA, a Radcliffe Bunting Fellowship, and a Guggenheim. She is also a songwriter and a public speaker who is in high demand at prestigious universities, libraries, and writers' festivals across the world. Karr is also a regular contributor to The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and Poetry magazine. She is currently the Peck Professor of Literature at Syracuse University.
