About Carol Ann Davis

It all started when…

The daughter of one of the NASA engineers who returned the Apollo 13 crew from the moon, Carol Ann Davis (above circa 1984) grew up on the east coast of Florida the youngest of seven children, then studied poetry at Vassar College and the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.  A poet and essayist, Carol Ann is the author of three poetry collections as well as a book of essays: Psalm (Tupelo Press, 2007), Atlas Hour (Tupelo Press, 2011), The Nail in the Tree: Essays on Art, Violence, and Childhood (Tupelo Press, 2020), and Songbird (Wesleyan University Press, 2026). Carol Ann has read her work at the Library of Congress, Poets House, on the website of the PBS NewsHour, and at the Los Angeles Times Book Festival. She is an NEA Fellow in Poetry and finalist for the National Magazine Award in Essays and Criticism, and her work appears in literary magazines and periodicals, including The Atlantic, The Daily Beast, The Georgia Review, Image, The Gettysburg Review, The American Poetry Review, and Agni. A former longtime editor of the literary journal Crazyhorse, she is Professor of English at Fairfield University, where she is Director of the Low-Residency MFA and founding director of Poetry in Communities, an initiative that brings writing workshops to communities hit by sudden or systemic violence.  She lives in Newtown, CT, with her husband and two sons.

 As featured in