Carling McManus lives on a mountainside orchard in West Virginia whose poetry has appeared in Pleiades, Best New Poets, Cream City Review, Southeast Review, The Beloit Poetry Journal, Palette Poetry, among others.
Carling has received scholarships and fellowships to Bread Loaf and the Virginia Center for Creative Arts and is a Tin House, Community of Writers, Kenyon Review Writers Workshop, and Under the Volcano alum.
Winner of the Gearhart Poetry Prize, selected by Benjamin Garcia, Carve Magazine’s Prose & Poetry Contest, and Pigeon Pages Poetry Contest, Carling’s work has been nominated for Best of the Net, was selected as a finalist for both the Frontier Poetry Nature and Place Prize and the Iowa Review Award, and was long-listed for Frontier Poetry’s New Voices Competition and The Poetry Society’s National Poetry Competition.
Co-founder and CEO of 84 Agency, a communications firm dedicated to amplifying the impact of change-makers and nonprofits, Carling lives with their spouse in Mink Shoals, West Virginia with their two border collies, Zeke and Ettie.
(Photo by Jen Susman)
Praise for Prizewinning Poems
“I imagine "How To Grow A Peach Tree" as a woman I get a glimpse of on the street walking somewhere in these rough modern times, and while she is so beautiful & striking, something about her seems ancient, like I could see her in an old movie or an old painting or read about her described by somebody who cannot have her.
That is to say that this poem, gorgeous, immediate, and stimulated by technology and all of the useless information we're constantly consuming, feels eternal. There are secrets within this poem, intimacies that I felt shy looking into.
It will make you think of all the times you've talked too much without actually truly saying what you wanted to say, and all of those silences where you were so sure of something you didn't want to say out loud.”
— Melissa Lozada-Oliva, Pigeon Pages 2022 Poetry Contest Judge and author of Dreaming of You and Peluda
“This poem, “Something Living”, holds so many of the elements I look for when reading poetry: dexterous movement, emotional heft, and beautiful sonic resonance in lines such as “beyond the eaves to reach the rain.
The interior world of this poem, as well as the unnamed figures that populate it feel fully realized in their relationship to the body and its myriad of blessings or harms, and to one another. I admire the way that this poem, even in its brevity, stakes out complex emotional terrain.”
— Jihyun Yun, Carve Magazine Prose & Poetry Judge and author of Some Are Always Hungry
Publications
"Returning From Provincetown, You Tell Me” - Beloit Poetry Journal (forthcoming Fall/Winter 2024)
"Bird Laws" - Cream City Review (Issue 47.2)
"Screening" - Cream City Review (Issue 47.2)
"Torsion” - Beloit Poetry Journal (Vol. 73 No. 1)
"Closed Circuit" - Southeast Review (Volume 41.2)
"Torsion” - Beloit Poetry Journal (Vol. 73 No. 1)
"Encounter At Musée Rodin" - Palette Poetry (2023)
"The Barrette" - Pleiades (Spring 2023)
"Light Iris" - Moist Poetry Journal (Fall 2022)
"Something Living" - Carve Magazine (Spring 2022)
"How To Grow A Peach Tree" - Pigeon Pages (Spring 2022)
"Origin" - Meridian (Issue No. 46, 2022)
"Returning To The Bastille" - Beloit Poetry Journal (Vol. 71 No. 2)
"To Eat An Ortolan" - Best New Poets (2020)
"Admission" - Beloit Poetry Journal (Vol. 70 No. 2, Fall 2020)
Awards, Fellowships, Conferences
Winner - The Southeast Review Gearhart Poetry Contest (2022)
Winner - Pigeon Pages Poetry Contest (2022)
Winner - Carve Magazine Poetry Contest (2021)
Nomination - Best of the Net (2022)
Finalist - Frontier Poetry Nature & Place Prize (2022)
Finalist - Iowa Review Award (2022)
Long list - Frontier Poetry New Voices Contest (2022)
Long list - The Poetry Society Competition (2020)
Under the Volcano Residency (2024)
Tin House Summer Workshop (2023)
Virginia Center for Creative Arts Fellowship, awarded by Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation (2022)
Kenyon Review Writer’s Workshop (2022)
Bread Loaf Writers' Conference Rona Jaffe Scholar (2021)
Community of Writers (2021)