Charlene is an Emeritus Professor of English at Columbus College of Art and Design, a wife, mother, grandmother, poet, writer, and activist for social justice. Her most recent published book is Taking a Walk in My Animal Hat, poems inspired by four-legged and winged beings (Bottom Dog Press 2018). Her poetry collection Jewgirl, short-listed for the Sexton Prize, is forthcoming from Eyewear Publishing in 2021. Her other books of poems include Frankenstein’s Flowers, inspired by myths, books, and films (CW Books 2014); Flowering Bruno: A Dography, poems inspired by ten years of walking a beloved dog, with illustrations by Susan Josephson, (XOXOX Press 2006) and finalist for the 2007 Ohioana Book Award in Poetry; Charlene Fix: Greatest Hits (chapbook, Kattywompus Press 2012), and Mischief (chapbook, Pudding House Press 2003).
Charlene also writes criticism. Harpo Marx as Trickster is her book-length homage/ study of Harpo’s role in the thirteen Marx brothers’ films (McFarland 2013). She has also published essays on works by Arthur Miller and Jack Kerouac: “The Lost Father in Death of a Salesman” (Michigan Quarterly Review, 2008) and “Yes and Yass: Dean Moriarty’s Ecstatic and Lugubrious Affirmations in Jack Kerouac’s On the Road” (Xavier Review 2014).
Charlene’s poems have earned some recognition. Ilya Kaminsky gave “Saint Kitchen” (in Jewgirl) an honorable mention for The Poetry Society of America’s Lyric Poem Award in 2019. “On the Outskirts of Vertigo” won PSA’s Louis Hammer Memorial Award for a poem in the surrealist manner in 2011 (selected by David Lehman), and ten of her poems won PSA’s Robert H. Winner Memorial Award in 2007 (selected by Eleanor Wilner) (in Frankenstein’s Flowers). The Manhattan Review nominated “They Thought Our Sins Were Bread” (in Jewgirl) for a Pushcart Prize in late 2019.
Charlene’s poems have appeared in various literary magazines, among them Poetry, Literary Imagination, The Cincinnati Review, Rattle, The Journal, Hotel Amerika, Forklift Ohio, Mudfish, Birmingham Poetry Review, and Pudding, as well as in several anthologies.
American poet, critic, professor 