Melissa Kwasny, a part-time English professor at Carroll College and a widely published author, has been selected as one of the two
of Montana’s poet laureates for 2019-2021. A poet laureate is a poet appointed every two years by the governor of Montana as a
consultant and typically involves the promotion of poetry. Melissa Kwasny and Mandy Smoker Broaddus are the first to share the position.
Kwasny has written six books of poetry including Where Outside the Body is the Soul Today as well as prose such as Putting on the Dog: The Animal Origins of What We Wear. Her writings are also widely published in journals including Willow Springs, Threepenny Review, Ploughshares, American Poetry Review, Gettysburg Review, Orion, Bellingham Review, Kenyon Review, and Boston Review.
Kwasny’s poems and essays are also included in the anthologies The Arcadia Project: North American Postmodern Pastoral, Montana Women Writers: A Geography of the Heart, Poems Across the Big Sky and New Poets of the American West, as well as in West of 98: Living and Writing the American West.
Kwasny is also the recipient of the Poetry Society of America Cecil Hemley Award and Alice Fay di Castagnola Award for a work in progress, the Montana Art Council's Artist's Innovation Award.