MARILYN KALLET, a poet, writer, and educator, served two terms as Knoxville Poet Laureate from June 2018 to July 2020. Born in Montgomery, Alabama, and grew up in New York, she attended Tufts University in Boston, Massachusetts, where she earned a B.A. in English and French in 1968. She also attended Sorbonne Université in Paris, France, where she received a degree in Cours de Civilisation (year unknown). Later, she received her M.A. (1976) and her Ph.D. (1978) in Comparative Literature from Rutgers University in New Jersey.
Dr. Kallet has published nineteen books, including the following eight books of poetry:
• Even When We Sleep (2022)
• How Our Bodies Learned (2018)
• The Love that Moves Me (2013)
• Packing Light: New and Selected Poems (2009)
• Circe, After Hours (2005)
• How To Get Heat Without Fire (1996)
• In the Great Night (1981) and
• Devils Live So Near (1977)
She has also translated the work of two French poets: Last Love Poems by Paul Éluard (1895-1952) and The Big Game by Benjamin Péret (1899-1959), among others.
Dr. Kallet is Professor Emerita of English at the University of Tennessee, where she taught for 37 years. From 2009 to 2018, she has also hosted poetry workshops and residencies for the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts in Auvillar, France. She has performed her poems across the United States as well as in France and Poland, as a guest of the U.S. Embassy’s “America Presents” program. Her poems have appeared in Plume, New Letters, Potomac Review, Still: The Jornal, and American Diversity Report, among others.
Her awards and honors include:
• James R. and Nell W. Cunningham Outstanding Teaching Award, College of Arts & Sciences Teaching Award, 2010
• Chancellor’s Academic Outreach Award, University of Tennessee, 2007
• East Tennessee Literary Hall of Fame in Poetry, 2005
• YWCA Tribute to Women, Woman of Achievement in the Arts, 2000
• Tennessee Arts Commission Literary Fellowship in Poetry, 1989
• Honorary Woodrow Wilson Fellowship, 1968
Photo of the poet Marilyn Kallet published on her website https://marilynkallet.com
