Caroline Parkman Barr
“I’ve lived in Alabama for most of my life - born and raised in the northern hills of Huntsville and attended undergrad on the southern plains of Auburn - but only recently moved to Birmingham. Recently, as in, a mere month before the COVID-19 lock-down struck the area kind of recently. So, while my full exploration of this new place, this new home, has been somewhat stagnated by an international pandemic - to me, Birmingham still means a new beginning, an adventure, a sense of renewal. The poem I’m reading today features the imagined persona of Cathedral Caverns, a beautiful and massive cave in North Alabama I grew up visiting on school trips and with out-of-town guests. While not located in Birmingham, the cave is a piece of Alabama that will always spark a feeling of exploration and adventure within me.”
Caroline Parkman Barr is a graduate of the MFA Writing Program at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, where she served as Poetry Editor of The Greensboro Review. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in RHINO, NELLE, The Hunger, North Dakota Quarterly, Connotation Press, South Carolina Review, and elsewhere. She is currently an editorial assistant for Poetry Northwest living in Birmingham, Alabama.