Songs of Appalachia

Fall 2024 Edition
Alumni & Friends Magazine

Young girl fishing on a pond in Appalachia

Songs of Appalachia

Alumna’s work honoring place and memory earn her top honors once more.

Barbara Costas-Biggs | September 12, 2024

For the third time, Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine has named Kari Gunter-Seymour, BFA ’94, MA ’16, as . The path to such an achievement wasn’t easy, however.

The ninth-generation Appalachian was a young, single mother when she moved back to Athens from Meigs County, living in assisted housing with a very small child and weaving baskets to make ends meet. She eventually saved enough money to take a creative writing class at OHIO in hopes of finding a path toward a better life for her son.

gets emotional talking about her life during those years and the help and encouragement she received, which eventually led her to enroll full-time and earn a degree in graphic design. After working in that field for a few years, she returned to the University as an employee and earned her master’s degree in commercial photography. Both disciplines continue to inform her work as a poet today.

“A photograph is a moment in time—that’s a poem. Graphic design is about organizing information so people see what you want them to see—that’s a poem,” Gunter-Seymour notes. Gunter-Seymour sees poetry everywhere, creates it out of dirt and memory, grit and duty.

Three-time Ohio Poet Laureate and 51�� alumna Kari Gunter-Seymour. Photo courtesy of BFlick Photography

Nowhere is that more evident than in her fourth full poetry collection, released one month after her two-year Laureateship began in January 2024. In its pages, she writes deftly of her generations-long Appalachian heritage, always lifting its people into normalcy, taking words like “warsh” and phrases like “fixin’ to go” into the mainstream.

Such work is partly in defiance of pushback she saw after being named Poet Laureate, with attitudes that a “rural, hillbilly poet” wasn’t a proper choice by those who perhaps forget that 32 of Ohio’s 88 counties are considered part of Appalachia. To that end, she aims to make space for poets “who nobody knows or reads,” she says, by getting through doors and bringing others through with her.

In her youth in Southeast Ohio, she “ran pretty wild—not in a bad way, just on my own,” Gunter-Seymour says. “My bicycle, swimming in the creek, all of us girls like a gang. We held each other’s secrets.” All of this comes through in “DIRT SONGS,” whose themes of perseverance, resiliency, strong women and attachment to place are met with a sexual energy that comes from writing about her experiences as a young woman. “I still have that mentality of wildness and needing to be on my own,” she says. “To roam, to be loud and just a little rough around the edges.”

Readers of Gunter-Seymour’s poetry, both in “DIRT SONGS” and in her previous collections (not to mention the anthologies she’s edited), will find themselves called to find the rough edges within themselves, too. As novelist Jacinda Townsend observes, “[t]o hear one of Gunter-Seymour’s dirt songs is to listen, intently, to the symphony of the human condition.”