About Carol Frost

Carol Frost was born in 1948 in Lowell, Massachusetts. She studied at the Sorbonne and earned degrees from the State University of Oneonta and Syracuse University. She currently teaches poetry and directs Winter with the Writers at Rollins College in Winter Park, Florida. Frost is the author of numerous collections, including her newest book entitled Alias City (MadHat Press). Its signature poem appeared in the November 2015 issue of Poetry. Frost has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, won several Pushcart Prizes, and has been nominated for many more. In 2020 FPSA nominated her as one of its candidates for Florida Poet Laureate. As described at PoetryFoundation.org: “Frost’s poems draw on sources from the Book of Genesis to Shakespeare’s The Tempest to the poetry of John Donne; she writes of the human body, and her poems are rich with the acutely imagined objects of the natural world—whether found off the coast of Florida or in a beehive. Honeycomb, which won the Gold Medal in Poetry from the Florida Book Awards, treats the subject of dementia through a sustained metaphor of the beehive. According to Amy Glynn Greacen in New York Quarterly Reviews, “the interweaving of lost and confabulated, confused knowledge is a running theme. In Frost’s deft hands it resonates and echoes through various natural processes and phenomena.” Frost has been praised for her “protean layers of observation,” in the words of a reviewer for the Women’s Review of Books, and for her inventive syntax; an interviewer at Smartish Pace described Frost’s “encyclopedic approach to subject matter.”

Carol Frost’s twelve poetry collections include Pure, I Will Say Beauty, Love and Scorn: New and Selected Poems, Alias City, and Honeycomb.  Her essays on literature and aesthetics first published in Humanities and the New England Review are widely anthologized, as are her poems, most recently in  In the Shape of the Human Body I am Visiting the Earth (Poetry International and McSweeney’s). The National Endowment for the Arts, Poets’ Prize, Elliston Award and Pushcart Prize committees have honored her work. The poems have also been widely published in journals including The American Poetry Review, Antaeus, Atlantic, Kenyon Review, the New York Times, the New Republic, Partisan Review, Poetry, Poetry International, and Shenandoah.

She has taught at the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, The Frost Place, the Vermont Studio Center, Chautauqua, the Warren Wilson MFA program, the New England College low residency MFA Program in Poetry, Bucknell University, Wichita State, Washington University, and in 2008 as the National Endowment for the Humanities Professor at SUNY, Postdam. In 2012/13 she served as director of the low residency program at New England College. She has given readings and workshops across Australia, in New Zealand, the Czech Republic, Austria, Mexico, Halifax, Montana, at the Dali Museum in St. Petersburg, and at dozens of colleges and universities throughout America. 

Since 2008, Frost has taught at Rollins College, where as the Theodore Bruce and Barbara Lawrence Alfond Professor of English she has directed the college’s yearly literary Festival, Winter With the Writers the last twelve years. She serves as a Chancellor for the Florida State Poets Association. 

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