Kari Gunter-Seymour is ninth generation Appalachian, her work is firmly and unapologetically attached to her home soil and is an examination of the long-lasting effects of stereotype and false narratives surrounding native Appalachians. Her poems appear in numerous journals and publications. Her current collection is titled A Place So Deep Inside America It Can't Be Seen (Sheila-Na-Gig Editions 2020). Gunter-Seymour is the founder/executive director of the Women of Appalachia Project (WOAP), and editor of the WOAP anthology series, Women Speak, volumes 1-5. She is a retired instructor in the E.W. Scripps School of Journalism at Ohio University and Poet Laureate of Ohio. A poem she wrote in support of families living in poverty in Athens County, OH, went viral and was seen by over 100,000 people, resulting in thousands of dollars donated to her local food pantry.

Books by Kari Gunter-Seymour:

Other poems on the web by Kari Gunter-Seymour:
"The Weeds In This Garden"
"Illumination"
"Badasses"

Kari Gunter-Seymour's Website.

Kari Gunter-Seymour on Twitter.

About A Place So Deep Inside America It Can't Be Seen:

"KariGunter-Seymour's new collection, A Place So Deep Inside America It Can't Be Seen, is a timeless array of poems that invites the reader to traverse memories that feel as sacred as scripture. The collection is stunning in its ability to elevate memory and hold singular experiences aloft for perusal. In concert, the poems read like a carefully preserved palimpsest, layered cohesively, suggesting there's always more where that came from. Not a single poem is negligible. This is an airtight intersection of family and kinship, and through Gunter-Seymour's meticulous model, we are asked to consider what we, too, have inherited from the land as much as from our people, and how any, many ways, 'Everything alive aches for more.'"
—Bianca X, Affrilachian

"'Generations pass and still we toil/scratch at scars, lose track of the path home' Kari Gunter-Seymour writes in her poignant new collection A Place So Deep Inside America It Can't Be Seen .These searing poems, however, have no trouble tracing the path to the ground of the poet's making—her childhood home—and to her mother and father, unforgettable, as flesh, ghost and memory. These poems feel necessary and real and stark as the Appalachian Mountains themselves."
—Rita Sims Quillen

"In A Place So Deep Inside America It Can't Be Seen, Kari Gunter-Seymour writes with clear, evocative language as she weaves stories of her people, especially the strong women in her life who are portrayed honestly and with compassion. She takes us along on an intergenerational journey through roles as daughter, granddaughter, mother, grandmother, all closely connected to those who came before and those yet to return home. These vivid poems, deeply rooted in place and nature, are filled with images of a life spent in northern Appalachia. Gunter-Seymour writes of planting by the signs and the music of Hank and Dolly, but moves onto contemporary themes like border walls and legacies of war. In these poems, the past meshes with the present, and provides solid footing to face the future. "
—Jayne Moore Waldrop