Kari Gunter-Seymour
Kari Gunter-Seymour is an Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellowship recipient, former poet laureate of Ohio, and a retired instructor in the E. W. Scripps School of Journalism at Ohio University. She is the executive director of the Women of Appalachia Project and editor of its anthology series, Women Speak. Her award-winning poetry collections include Dirt Songs, Alone in the House of My Heart, and A Place So Deep Inside America It Can’t Be Seen. In All That Teethes Within, poet Kari Gunter-Seymour translates the poignant complexity of loss into words. The poems mourn a loved one’s sudden passing, opportunity missed due to poverty or gender inequality, and the piece of one’s identity that vanishes or fades with age.
Featured Book
All That Teethes Within
In All That Teethes Within, poet Kari Gunter-Seymour translates the poignant complexity of loss into words. This exploration of heartache is layered with the poet’s Appalachian identity and overflows with sadness and anger toward the forces that cause societal and environmental damage in the region. The poems mourn a loved one’s sudden passing, opportunity missed due to poverty or gender inequality, and the piece of one’s identity that vanishes or fades with age..
Gunter-Seymour’s interrogation of grief and destruction quietly weaves in elements of nature—’Breezes whistle like wisps of memory / inside clusters of hemlock’—to counter profound pain. Small joys found in friendship, the land, grandchildren, and wildlife round out this collection. All That Teethes Within reckons with the incomprehensible reality of a sibling’s suicide, serving as a guide for survival and a call to speak the truth of our anguish and our rapture.
Meet Kari Gunter-Seymour and get a copy of their book at the 2026 Kentucky Book Festival, Saturday, November 7, 2026, at Joseph-Beth Booksellers.