Chuck Carlise is the author of the poetry collections, In One Version of the Story (New Issues Poetry & Prose), A Broken Escalator Still Isn’t the Stairs (Concrete Wolf Poetry Series) and Casual Insomniac (Bateau, “Boom Chapbook Contest” winner).  He is the recipient of the InPrint/Paul Verlaine Poetry Prize as well as the Academy of American Poets C.T. Wright Award, and his work has garnered a half-dozen Pushcart Prize nominations, two Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Prizes, and inclusion in multiple Best New Poets anthologies.  He has spoken or read in dozens of venues, including as the Keynote Speaker at the Sigma Tau Delta annual conference.  His poems and essays appear in Southern Review, Pleiades, DIAGRAM, Quarterly West, Beloit Poetry Journal, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Southeast Review, and elsewhere.

Chuck completed his PhD in Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Houston, after previously earning degrees from Wittenberg University and the University of California at Davis. During these years, he served on the editorial staff of Swan Scythe Poetry Press, and spent two years as nonfiction editor for the journal Gulf Coast.  More recently, he has taught at UC-Santa Cruz, Westminster College, and Grand Valley State University, as well as at the Boldface Writer’s Conference and as Poet-in-Residence with Writers in the Schools. Chuck has lived in the four corners of the U.S. and parts beyond, calling 14 different states “home” over the years, as well as keeping an occasional apartment in Sicily.  Outside of academia (and numerous temp positions and dish-dog stints), he spent spent several years in the non-profit sector, primarily as an activist and community organizer in Portland, Oregon.

He is currently at work on a new volume of poems and multiple chapbook projects, as well as a memoir of his years on the Greyhound Bus Lines.  In Fall of 2022, he joined the Ashland University Department of Languages and Literatures, as Assistant Professor of English, teaching undergraduate literature and creative writing, serving on the faculty of the Ashland MFA, and directing the Ashland Poetry Press.