Carla Barger is a poet and lyric essayist who hails from the farmlands of southwest Ohio. She holds an MFA in Writing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and attended the PhD program at SUNY Binghamton. She’s currently a PhD candidate at the University of Illinois Chicago where she also teaches. 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 was nominated for the AWP Intro Journals Project Award.

Carla’s creative work explores place and landscape, liminality, family dynamics and transgenerational hauntings, and our degradation of nature and each other. She sometimes collaborates with visual artists, scholars, and other writers on various types of projects. She also researches and writes about ecopoetics, film theory and criticism, ghostlore, hauntology, and Emily Bronte’s canonical novel, Wuthering Heights. Carla has a keen interest in environmental and public humanities. She uses digital tools to create interdisciplinary public-facing projects that marry lyric poetry and research in various fields.

Carla is also a former editor and academic administrator. To learn more about her career background, go here and here.  She has lived in many places but currently resides in Brookfield, IL, with her wife, the production designer Jessie Haddad, and little copper husky, Lucille Ball.