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Carol Ann Davis is a poet, essayist, and author of the poetry collections Psalm (2007) and Atlas Hour (2011), and The Nail in the Tree: Essays on Art, Violence, and Childhood (2020), all available from Tupelo Press.
The daughter of one of the NASA engineers who returned the Apollo 13 crew from the moon, she 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 former longtime editor of the literary journal Crazyhorse, she is Professor of English at Fairfield University, where she directs the Low-Residency MFA Program and is 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.
[…] Carol Ann Davis is a writer who spoke to us about her recent book The Nail in the Tree. Aside from her writing, she teaches at Fairfield University and, at the time she spoke to us on March 11, 2020, was in the process of preparing the university for remote learning in response to the COVID-19 Pandemic. Her new book is an essay collection narrating her time living in the aftermath of the Sandy Hook shooting in Newtown. Her sons were elementary students at another school in Newtown that day and this book examines that day and raising her boys in the subsequent years. To hear more about how Davis took on the daunting task of getting words on paper about this personal and indeed national trauma, listen to the complete interview. […]