Jared Carter (born January 10, 1939) is an American poet and editor.
Life Carter was born in 1939 in Elwood, Indiana, and attended Yale University and Goddard College. Before he became a poet, he worked as a newspaper journalist and served in the military.
Poetry Carter writes in free verse and in traditional forms. Much of his early work is set in "Mississinewa County", an imaginary place that includes the actual Mississinewa River, a tributary of the Wabash River.
In recent years, as he has published increasingly on the web, his poetry has ranged farther afield. His poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Nation, Poetry, and other journals in the U.S. and abroad."
His first collection, Work, for the Night Is Coming (1981), won the Walt Whitman Award. His second, After the Rain (1993), was given the Poets' Prize. He has received two literary fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Indiana Governor's Arts Award.
Awards Able Muse Book Award, 2026 Proclamation of Jared Carter Day, Elwood, Indiana, 2026 Best Book of Poetry, Indiana Center for the Book, 2007 Distinguished Hoosier Award, 2005 Rainmaker Award for Poetry, Zone 3 magazine, 2002 Poets' Prize, for After the Rain, 1994 Dictionary of Literary Biography Yearbook Award, 1993 New Letters Literary Award for Poetry, 1992 Literature Fellowship, National Endowment for the Arts, 1981, 1991 Pushcart Prize for Poetry, 1986 Indiana Governor's Arts Award, 1985 Writer-in-Residence, Purdue University, 1983, 1986 Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award for Poetry, 1982 Fellowship, John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, 1982 Margaret Bridgman Fellowship, Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, 1981 Walt Whitman Award, for Work, for the Night Is Coming, 1980 Literature Fellowship, Indiana Arts Commission, 1979 Academy of American Poets Prize, Yale University, 1961
Poems in Anthologies The Colosseum Book of Contemporary Verse.Steubenville,Ohio: Catholic University of America Press, in partnership with Franciscan University Press, 2025. Compiled by Sunil Iyengar. Twentieth-Century American Poetry.New York: McGraw-Hill, 2003. Compiled by Dana Gioia, David Mason, and Meg Schoerke. . Contemporary American Poetry.New York: Penguin Academics Series, 2005. Compiled by R. S. Gwynn and April Lindner.. Writing Poems.New York: Longman, 2004. Compiled by Michelle Boisseau and Robert Wallace. . Poetry from Paradise Valley.San Antonio, Texas: Pecan Grove Press, 2010. Edited by Edward Byrne. .
Books The Land Itself. Morgantown, West Virginia: Monongehela Books, 2019. Darkened Rooms of Summer: New and Selected Poems. Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 2014. A Dance in the Street. Nicholasville, Kentucky: Wind Publications, 2012. Cross This Bridge at a Walk. Nicholasville, Kentucky: Wind Publications, 2006. Les Barricades Mystérieuses. Cleveland: Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 1999. After the Rain. Cleveland: Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 1993. Work, for the Night Is Coming. New York: Macmillan, 1981.
Chapbooks Blues Project. Indianapolis: Writers’ Center Press, 1991. Situation Normal. Indianapolis: Writers’ Center Press, 1991. The Shriving. Tuscaloosa, Alabama: Duende Press, 1990. Millennial Harbinger. Philadelphia: Slash & Burn Press, 1986. Pincushion's Strawberry. Cleveland: Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 1984. Fugue State. Daleville, Indiana: Barnwood Press, 1984. Early Warning. Daleville, Indiana: Barnwood Press, 1979.
E-books Time Capsule. E-book no. 26. Dayton, Washington: New Formalist Press, 2007. Reading the Tarot: Nine Villanelles. E-book no. 17. Dayton, Washington: New Formalist Press, 2005.
Sources Deines, Timothy J."The Gleaning: Regionalism, Form, and Theme in the Poetry of Jared Carter." M.A. thesis, Cleveland State University. "Jared Carter." Contemporary Authors . Vol. 145, pp. 75–76. Detroit: Gale Research, 1995. Purdy, Gilbert Wesley. The Ties of the Railroad Tracks Home: the Poetry of Jared Carter. Kindle edition, 2014. Ponick, T. L., and Ponick, F. S. "Jared Carter." Dictionary of Literary Biography. Vol. 282, pp. 31–40. Detroit: Gale Research, 2003. Webb, Jeffrey B. "Watershed Redesign in the Upper Wabash River Drainage Area 1870-1970." Environment, Space, Place 6:1 (spring 2016): 80–86. Zeta Books: Bucharest.
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