A Poet Librarian

My name is Melissa Eleftherion Carr. I work as a Branch Librarian with Mendocino County Library. Like a lot of librarians, I wear many hats in relationship with our community – reference, reader’s advisory, collection development, outreach, publicity, marketing, project management, circulation, food service… whatever it takes. It’s the best job in the world.

I’m also a poet, currently serving as the Poet Laureate of Ukiah, CA 2021-2023. My work has been collected in various forms and fragments including journals, anthologies, a full-length collection, and ten chapbooks including: huminsect (dancing girl press, 2013), prism maps (dusie kollektiv), Pigtail Duty (dancing girl press, 2015), the leaves the leaves (poems-for-all, 2018), green glass asterisms (poems-for-all, 2018), little ditch (above/ground press, 2018) trauma suture (above/ground press, 2020), & abalone (poems-for-all, 2021). My poems have been published in over 100 journals and anthologies, including Entropy, Flag+Void, Lunch Ticket, Pith, Queen Mob’s Teahouse, & Vector Press.

My first full-length collection, field guide to autobiography, was recently published by The Operating System. The book explores the inter-relatedness of various species through accreted fragments toward autobiography. How does a person begin to enumerate the many fragments & fractals that comprise a life? field guide to autobiography is an attempt at memoir through the lens of various animals & minerals including katydids, wrens, abalone shells, and apple trees.

The Poetry Center Chapbook Exchange is a community-curated archive I created and developed for poets to convene, correspond, and collaborate via the currency of the poetry community: chapbooks. This cooperative model has facilitated the compilation of a diverse and innovative collection of poetry chapbooks for public access. We began by inviting a select group of core contributors, and grew our collection in just a few months to comprise 30+ chapbooks freely available on the web. A paper chronicling the project was published in the peer-reviewed Journal of Electronic Resources Librarianship (JERL). You can also read more about the chapbook exchange here and here. 

• Copyright

  

  apoetlibrarian by Melissa Eleftherion is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.