Carol Grannick
Current City, State, Country
Birth City, State, Country
Biography
Carol Coven Grannick found that the music and language of poetry deeply touched and entranced her from a young age. Born when parents still gifted Robert Louis Stevenson’s A Child’s Garden of Verses somehow her family members knew to continue giving her books of poetry (and books in general!) when young, and when old enough, complete collections of Robert Frost and Edna St. Vincent Millay, which she still treasures.
Since childhood, her poetry has always responded to the objects, lives, imprints, and experiences of being alive in the world, integrating wonder and awe, joy and anguish, longing, belief, and social justice—and probably more!
Although she has written poetry and creative nonfiction since young, none of it was with an awareness of what it meant to be a writer in the world—i.e., to know about the business of writing. Once she got that part of her act together in 1999, she’s been prolific in writing and submitting fiction and poetry for children and poetry for adults. Her middle grade novel in verse, Reeni’s Turn, debuted in 2020 from Fitzroy Books, having been awarded Honorable Mention in the 2018 Sydney Taylor Manuscript Award and Finalist in the Katherine Paterson Award, as well as two Illinois Arts Council Grants for a work-in-progress.
Grannick’s poetry for adults appears/is forthcoming most recently in the Jewish Writing Project, Writing in a Woman’s Voice, Bloom, The Birmingham Arts Journal, West Texas Review and more. Children’s work appears/is forthcoming in Cricket, Ladybug, Babybug, Highlights, Hello, and The Dirigible Balloon.
What is the relationship between Judaism and/or Jewish culture and your poetry?
Although I was raised in a minimally observant Jewish home, there was never a doubt of our strong Jewish identity and history, and that travels with me daily. My own Jewish life evolves over the years, mixes with my deep spiritual connection to the natural world, and creates poetry. I believe if I dismantled each and every poem, it would come from “a Jewish place” inside me, whether or not the content was explicitly Jewish. However, a good deal of my poetry does have Jewish content, and my first children’s novel in verse, Reeni’s Turn, is the story of a moderately observant Conservative Jewish girl facing powerful body image issues and discovering that courage, passion, and taking chances is independent of body size.
Published Works
Reeni’s Turn (Fitzroy Publishing, 2020)
Author Site
Links to Sample Works
Education
Yeshiva University/Wurzweiler Graduate School of Social Work, M.S.W.
Columbia University/Barnard College, B.A. Creative Writing, Art History