Carla Barger is an ecolyric poet and essayist who hails from the farmlands of southwest Ohio. She holds a PhD from the University of Illinois Chicago and an MFA in Writing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She’s currently Visiting Assistant Professor at University of South Dakota. 

Carla’s creative work explores place and landscape, spectrality, liminality, transgenerational trauma, and our degradation of nature and each other. She often incorporates elements of folklore in her work. Carla has a keen interest in environmental and public humanities and uses digital tools to create interdisciplinary public-facing projects that marry poetry and research in various fields. She also sometimes collaborates with visual artists, scholars, and other writers on various types of projects.