Carla Barger is an ecolyric poet and essayist who hails from the farmlands of southwest Ohio. She holds a PhD in English from the Program for Writers at the University of Illinois Chicago, and an MFA in Writing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She’s the poetry editor for the literary journal Jarnal, the copyeditor for Harvard Papers in Botany, and a visiting lecturer for the 2025/26 academic year at the University of Illinois Chicago. Her work has appeared in decomP magazinE, Green Hills Literary Lantern, The Light Ekphrastic, MidAmerica and elsewhere. She received the 2019 David Diamond Writing Prize from the Society for the Study of Midwestern Literature and the Malcolm Sedam Writing Award for Poetry from Miami University, and has been nominated for the AWP Intro Journals Project Award.

Carla’s creative work explores place and landscape, spectrality, transgenerational trauma, bootstrapping, and our degradation of nature and each other. She also researches and teaches film rhetoric and Emily Bronte’s canonical novel, Wuthering Heights. Carla has a keen interest in environmental and public humanities and enjoys creating interdisciplinary public-facing projects that marry lyric poetry and research in various fields. She also sometimes collaborates with visual artists, scholars, and other writers.

Carla is a former freelance editor and academic administrator. To learn more about her career background, go here. She has lived in many places but currently resides in the Midwest with her wife and their little copper husky, Lucille Ball.