Skip to Content

2008 Speakers

Mary Karr

Mary Karr is a poet and memoirist whose sardonic voice and talent for metaphor make her poems distinctive. Karr grew up in an industrial city in East Texas, which was the basis for her bestselling memoir, The Liar’s Club (1995). She has also published four volumes of poetry, the most recent of which is Sinners Welcome (2006), which illustrates her life as a “black-belt sinner” and her conversion to Catholicism in 1996. Karr is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship for Poetry and the Whiting Award. She lives in New York City, where she is the Peck Professor of English at Syracuse University.