Born in Westerly, RI, Carla Panciera was raised on her family’s dairy farm. She graduated from the University of New Hampshire with a BA in English and has a graduate degree in poetry from Boston University where she studied with George Starbuck and Derek Walcott.
She has published three collections of poetry: One of the Cimalores (Cider Press Award Winner), No Day, No Dusk, No Love (Bordighera Press Award) and One Trail of Longing, Another of String (Bordighera 2025). Her poetry has appeared in numerous magazines including Poetry, Painted Bride Quarterly, Nimrod, Water~Stone Review, the Carolina Quarterly, and the Los Angeles Review.
Her collection of short stories, Bewildered, received the 2013 Grace Paley Short Fiction Award from the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (Pam Houston, judge) and was published by the University of Massachusetts Press in the fall of 2014. Her short stories have appeared in the New England Review, the Clackamas Review, Slice, and other magazines. Her short story, “The Kind of People Who Look at Art” was indexed by Junot Diaz as a distinguished story in Best American Short Stories for 2017.
Barnflower: A Rhode Island Farm Memoir was published in the spring of 2023 by Loom Press, Amesbury, MA. Her essays and reviews have appeared in several journals including the Chattahoochee Review, the Georgetown Review, Sugar House Review, and Under the Sun.
She has received support from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the Bread Loaf Writers Conference and the Massachusetts Cultural Council.
A retired high school English teacher, Carla lives on the North Shore of Massachusetts.
