Carling McManus is poet living on a mountainside orchard in West Virginia whose work has appeared in Pleiades, Best New Poets, Cream City Review, Southeast Review, The Beloit Poetry Journal, Palette Poetry, among others.

Carling has received scholarships and fellowships to Bread Loaf and the Virginia Center for Creative Arts and is a Tin House, Community of Writers, Kenyon Review Writers Workshop, and Under the Volcano alum. A survivor of conversion therapy, Carling is an outspoken advocate for LGBTQ civil rights.

Winner of Carve Magazine’s 2021 Prose & Poetry Contest and Pigeon Pages 2022 Poetry Contest, Carling’s work has been nominated for Best of the Net, was selected as a finalist for both the Frontier Poetry Nature and Place Prize and the Iowa Review Award, and was longlisted for Frontier Poetry’s New Voices Competition and The Poetry Society’s National Poetry Competition.

Co-founder and CEO of 84 Agency, a communications firm dedicated to amplifying the impact of change-makers and nonprofits, Carling lives with their spouse in Mink Shoals, West Virginia with their two border collies, Zeke and Ettie.

(Photo by Jen Susman)