Therese Gleason (Carr) grew up in Louisville, Kentucky. She has lived in Madrid, Spain; Columbia, South Carolina; Washington, D.C., and most recently, Worcester, Massachusetts. Her first chapbook, Libation (2006), was written during several months she spent in Cape Coast, Ghana, where she participated in an archaeological dig in the village of Dominase. Libation was selected by Kwame Dawes as co-winner of the South Carolina Poetry Initiative Chapbook Competition. Therese’s second chapbook, Matrilineal (Finishing Line, 2021), mines archival sources and family lore about the women on her maternal line.

A Pushcart and Best-of-the-Net nominee, her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in 32 Poems, Rattle, Indiana Review, America, New Ohio Review, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Painted Bride Quarterly, The Worcester Review, San Pedro River Review, Literary Mama, Psaltery & Lyre, Halfway Down the Stairs, SWWIM Every Day, Plainsongs, Limestone, Off the Margins, Mass Poetry’s Hard Work of Hope series, and Network, the newsletter of the International Women’s Writing Guild. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in Spanish (1998) and a Master’s degree in English (2001) from the University of Kentucky (UK), where she was awarded the Wilhelmina Barrett Award for Poetry from the Honors Program and a Gaines Fellowship in the Humanities. While at UK, she received an undergraduate research and creativity grant to walk the Camino de Santiago pilgrimage route in Spain. Therese has an MFA in Poetry from Pacific University.