Wisconsin Poet Laureate 2017-2018, Karla Huston, formerly of Appleton, Wisconsin, now lives in Southern California.

Karla Huston is the author of eight chapbooks of poetry, most recently Grief Bone—Five Oaks Press, 2017. She has also published two full collections: A Theory of Lipstick, Main Street Rag Publications, 2013 and Ripple, Scar, and Story, Kelsay Books, 2022. Huston has published poetry, reviews and interviews in many state and national journals.

Book cover photo (The Angel of Chacho Alley) and author photo by Jennifer Selbrede Photography.


Huston’s poems find their roots in the stories people tell—those memories and perceptions, personal and cultural mythologies which define us as human. From ancient Greek gods to Hollywood movie stars, Huston’s poems explore a wide variety of subjects, but frequently return to topics related to memory and women.

During her term as poet laureate, she worked with Wisconsin’s elders suffering from mild to moderate dementia in Memory Café settings. More information can be found at www.wisconsinpoetlaureate.org

Newest book :
Ripple, Scar, and Story

Available now on the Kelsay Bookstore or directly from the author. To purchase from author, send an email.


Left Wrist  

Good-bye, dear wrist, small runway 
to my hand—the way you flex 
and extend, how I love your soft 
blonde hairs, the way you shrug 
into my sleeve when I’m cold.  
Good-bye to the underside, skin 
pale as milk, a blue river of blood pulsing 
through, sweet freckle and lump.  
Today you are broken, skin purpled 
and swollen, but tomorrow, you 
will be cut and probed, bones poked 
into place, then plated and screwed 
into something stronger, better, 
perhaps bionic. So long to the old.
Goodbye to the smooth 
and pristine. Hello ripple,
scar and story.

I love this book filled with numinous objects of memory and daily life: a grandmother’s rolling pin smelling of “Crisco and butter,” Father’s horns “upright/ silver bass and the curly/sousaphone.” Mother’s gold bridge, “Now around my neck,/ a pendant . . .” I love the sanctification of the lake scape, landscape, of Wisconsin with its “cathedral of trees,” and “more lakes than Minnesota,” home to cardinals and Sandhill cranes, and frogs and fish. I hold with William Stafford who says, “Our best work derives merely from a continuity of our daily selves.” And to Stafford’s dictum, I would add the daily selves of our memory, and offer Ripple, Scar, and Story as proof, a terrific book by a poet at the height of her powers.

Donna Hilbert, author of Threnody

Awards:

Flight Patterns: winner of the 2003 Main Street Rag Chapbook Contest

An Inventory of Lost Things: Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets chapbook contest 2009, finalist

• Best of the Small Presses Pushcart Prize 2012

• Wisconsin Library Association Outstanding Achievement Award for A Theory of Lipstick: Mainstreet Rag Publishing Company: 2013

• The Eric Hoffer Award for Excellence in Independent Publishing for Grief Bone, Five Oaks Press: 2017

• Wisconsin Library Association Outstanding Achievement Award for Grief Bone, Five Oaks Press: 2017

• Hanns Kretzschmar Award for Excellence in the Arts: 2019 (Celebrating Volunteers: Appleton, Wisconsin)

Education:

• B.S. in education: English, University of Wisconsin Oshkosh, 1994. 

• M.A. in English—creative writing emphasis, University of Wisconsin Oshkosh, 2003.