Carol Parris Krauss enjoys writing about people and places. Her work is strong in visual imagery, and her poetry can take you places where you have never been.

ODU Virginia Poet’s Directory

Shop: At Amazon

Shop: At Kelsay Books

You can purchase my chapbook at

Poetry Box or Amazon.

Honors:

2018 Best New Poet by University of Virginia Press

Winner of the 2021 Eastern Shore Writers Crossroads Competition

Selected for Ghost City’s 2023 Online Summer Micro-Chapbook Series

LVA 25th Literary Award Nominee

2023 Finalist(Honorable Mention) Ron Rash Contest @ Broad River

Carol Parris Krauss’ first book, Just a Spit Down the Road, was published by Kelsay in 2021, and she was the winner of the Eastern Writers Association Crossroads Contest.

Email: Carolpkrauss@gmail.com

The Old Folks Call It God’s Country is full of love and transitions: old bridges, old houses with too-small replacement windows that block the mountain views, old memories that slide into the present. We meet Krauss’s grandfather, an alcoholic, but the standout image in his poem is a beautiful window full of brightly colored bottles—stained glass, really. And there is a wonderful lament about a small crop of winter lettuce, ruined by a cold snap. This is a book of the rural Carolinas with their mountain streams, homegrown corn, and Dollar Stores, where men are gifted the tools but women put the household wheels in motion. These allusive poems, with references to Jane Kenyon and Eudora Welty, create a kind of liminal space, a pause for reflection between a little girl’s miserable corrective shoes and an older woman’s sore hip. Carol Krauss can see bullets in red rubber pencil erasers, but also finds grace on mountain tops and a cruise downtown to the old Courthouse. I call shotgun!

—Christine Potter, author of Unforgetting,Sheltering in Place
and The Bean Books series