karla k. morton is a poet and songwriter. She is the 2010 Texas State Poet Laureate, a member of the Texas Institute of Letters, former Creative Consultant for the Texas Poets Podcast, and graduate of Texas A&M University.
Described as “one of the most adventurous voices in American poetry,” she is a National Heritage Wrangler Award Winner, Betsy Colquitt Award Winner, twice an Indie National Book Award Winner, North Texas Book Festival Award Winner, Tennessee Williams Key West Exhibit Poetry Winner, Finalist for the Montaigne Medal, and short-listed for Ireland’s Gregory O'Donoghue International Poetry Competition.
Morton is the recipient of the E2C Writer-in-Residency Grant, has fourteen collections of poetry, and is guest editor for TCU Press’ Selected Works of Walt McDonald. She is published in such journals as Alaska Quarterly Review, American Life in Poetry (The Poetry Foundation), Arkansas Review, Comstock Review, Southword Literary Journal, Lascaux Review, Boulevard, New Ohio Review, descant, REAL:Regarding Arts and Letters, Borderlands: Texas Poetry in Review, Concho River Review, The Texas Review, Southwestern American Literature, Right Hand Pointing, Oak Bend Review, Silver Birch Press, Windhover, Forces, Texas Books in Review, The Langdon Review of the Arts, The Heartland Review, Blue Rock Review, Ilya’s Honey, Voices de la Luna, San Pedro River Review, Mohave River Review, New Texas, ARDENT, and many more.
Morton is a nominee for the National Cowgirl Hall of Fame, and established an ekphrastic collaborative touring exhibit titled "No End of Vision", pairing photography with poetry. Morton’s work has been used by many students in their UIL Contemporary Poetry contests, and Morton has become one of the first twelve inductees to the Denton, Texas Arts Walk of Fame, along with Norah Jones, O’Neil Ford, Ray Wylie Hubbard, Pat Boone and others.
Her book, Wooden Lions (Texas Review Press 2017), is a National Heritage Wrangler Award poetry book with each poem containing an animal. Noted author Carl Safina blurbed the book. Morton is working on an audio-book of this collection, to be released soon!
She has just completed her "Words of Preservation: a Poets Laureate National Parks Tour" with fellow Texas State Poet Laureate Alan Birkelbach (podcast interview on NPR Wyoming and Blue Dot). And their book just published by TCU Press is now available: "The National Parks: A Century of Grace". Morton and Birkelbach traveled to all 62 National Parks, wrote poems, took photos and put them into this beautiful full-colour, hard-bound coffee-table book. A percentage of the proceeds of this book will be donated back to the National Parks system.
Singer/Songwriter Lisa Carver put morton and Birkelbach's lyrics to music in the the song "Go Around". It is written as a way to help preserve and protect our sacred spaces - telling those with intent to harm these areas, just to "Go Around".
Naturalist Dave Schlom wrote the Afterword, and Singer/Songwriter Michael Martin Murphey wrote the Foreword. Murphey was so inspired by the poets work, that they are working on an album based on those poems.
It is very historic as there has never been a book of poetry written by two Poets Laureate for all 62 National Parks to help culturally preserve and protect our parks for the next seven generations.
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