June 9, 2020

Mary Kratt Shares Poetry and History in “Watch where you walk” and “Charlotte, NC, A Brief History”

Podcast: Download (Duration: 1:01:32 — 56.5MB)

In this episode 112, we visit with Mary Kratt, author of the poetry collection, “Watch where you walk,” the history book, “Charlotte, North Carolina, A Brief History,” and many other books.

Fred Chappell, former North Carolina Poet Laurate says of “Watch where you walk,” that it is “clean-lined, economical, pointed, and soulful,” and that “these lyrics strike to the heart of things immediately, then linger with musical suggestion in the mind.”

Mary thinks of herself as “a poet who writes history,” because she began as a poet but was invited and led to write history. Turns out, she was innately curious and found it fascinating to dig into the past and interview characters who let her in, really in. Her book, “Charlotte, North Carolina, A Brief History” (The History Press) is an example of one search into Charlotte’s history, which is filled with interesting stories and pictures, too.

Since Mary started as a poet, we start the show with her reading her poem “Living With a Man Who Loves John Wayne” from her collection, “Watch where you walk.”

Connect with the author

https://www.facebook.com/mkratt1

About “Watch where you walk”

http://lorimerpress.com/2015/03/watch-where-you-walk-by-mary-kratt/

Other Books by Mary Kratt

A Bird in the House

Charlotte, North Carolina: A Brief History

The Imaginative Spirit

Legacy: The Myers Park Story with Tom Hanchett

A Little Charlotte Scrapbook

Charlotte: Spirit of the New South

Marney

My Dear Miss Eva

New South Women

The Only Thing I Fear is a Cow and a Drunken Man On the Steep Side

Remembering Charlotte: Postcards with Mary Boyer Small Potatoes

Spirit Going Barefoot

Southern Is…

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About the Author

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Norton_Kratt

https://prabook.com/web/mary.kratt/222595

Watch where you walk is Mary Kratt’s latest collection of poems. This book is about survival, joy in nature, women, wartime, travel, mischief, in other words…life and death and what is in between.

Her other books of poetry include The Only Thing I Fear Is A Cow and a Drunken Man (Carolina Wren Press), On The Steep Side and Spirit Going Barefoot, winner of the Oscar Arnold Young Award both from (Briarpatch Press), Small Potatoes, winner of the Brockman/Campbell Poetry Book Award (St. Andrews Press) and a chapbook, Valley, (Sow’s Ear Press). Her poems have appeared in Shenandoah, Tar River Poetry, New Virginia Review, Stone Country, New Mexico Humanities Review, Greensboro Review, Nimrod, Yankee, and others.

Mary is a 1996 winner of a North Carolina Arts Council Grant to MacDowell Colony in New Hampshire. Twice winner of the Blumenthal Writers and Readers Series sponsored by the North Carolina Writers’ Network, she won the Fortner Writer-in-Community Award from St. Andrews College in 1994. She served on the Speakers Bureau of the North Carolina Humanities Council.

Because of her books and essays on Charlotte history, Mary was commissioned to write walking tours of Uptown Charlotte and led regional day-trip history tours for teachers and residents for the Museum of the New South.

She lives in Charlotte and taught at UNC-Charlotte from 1992-97. Her BA from Agnes Scott College and MA from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte are in English Literature.

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