Kelly Cherry

Kelly Cherry was born in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and grew up in Ithaca, New York, and Chesterfield County, Virginia. She did graduate work in philosophy at the University of Virginia and earned an MFA from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Cherry was the daughter of violinists, and her early exposure to music has had a profound affect on her work, which ranges in genre from poetry to novels to short fiction to memoir to criticism. In an interview with Kaite Hillenbrand, Cherry noted that “musical dynamics, phrasing, pitch, tone, texture, orchestration et al. provide inspiration, and sometimes a model, for a poet, as do the lives of some composers.”