Writer -Artist - Educator
Kari Ann Ebert is a poet, prose writer, educator, artist, and innovator living in Delaware. Her poetry, fiction, essays, and interviews have been internationally published online and in print literary journals and anthologies such as Night Heron Barks, Meniscus, Free State Review, Philadelphia Stories, Columbia Journal, and The Ekphrastic Review, among others. She creates and self-publishes zines and art/poetry collages, and has most recently launched Slowetry, a poetry/art monthly snail-mail subscription. Her limited-edition chapbook, Alphabet of Mo(u)rning (2022, Lily Press), is available here.
Kari’s love of writing started as early as six years old,
“I’ve written poems since I can remember. Before my mother passed she still had a few from when I just learned how to write. I was fascinated by words and how beautiful or scary they could sound.”
She became an English teacher, finding satisfaction in inspiring students and instilling the joy of writing. But after her children were grown, she decided to pay attention to her own inner landscape. “Poetry called to me more than any other discipline,” so she found a poetry writing group that encouraged and challenged her.
Ebert’s earliest poetic influences were e.e. cummings and Sylvia Plath (“pretty common for an adolescent”). Fascinated with cummings’ approach to poetics and Plath’s dark emotionalism, her early work was dramatic. “I love words and I threw in all the darlings I could find.” But today she finds inspiration in writers of a different kind. Kaveh Akbar “guts me every time I read his poems,” and she loves how Galway Kinnell and Frank Bidart uncover “the strangeness in the familiar, new ways of unraveling something with language.”
One of her great challenges – because of “how slowly I write” – is that of time. Inspired by moments “that cause time to stand still or repeat itself,” Ebert pays minute attention to each verbal nuance in her crystalline poems.
“Every word, syllable, sound, punctuation mark”
speaks to her, and she gives them
“the honor of slow deliberation.”
Rejection is something all poets struggle with, Ebert included. But it’s greatly rewarding when her poems move a reader. “I feel like poetry should be a connecting art. If I can make a connection with someone who doesn’t think about poetry daily like I do, that’s a huge compliment for me.”
She enjoys sewing, upcycling otherwise discarded materials, collaging, printmaking, and “puttering around” in her studio. Leaning into her creative side, Kari has recently begun working on a limited-edition bespoke art & poetry chapbook made by hand, employing techniques in papermaking, printmaking, letterpress, and book binding. This project
has opened up an opportunity to create a monthly poetry/art subscription available through snail-mail called Slowetry. It is focused on connecting subscribers to the slow practice of intentional imagination and transformation that is a core human experience.
Kari loves Victorian & vintage antiques, and owns four typewriters all of which have their own names and personalities. She has had Hazel Diane, her 1960’s Olympia typewriter, completely refurbished by Philly Typewriter, and is saving to have Spike, her rare 1919 Oliver batwing typewriter, restored. She brings Hazel and Spike to events, offering personalized impromptu poems to attendees.
To find out more about Kari’s writing, offerings, and services, or just to connect, you can contact her here.
** Italicised sections extracted from Delaware Division of the Arts 2020 Individual Artist Fellowship interview, written by Gail Obendreder.