Carla Du Pree is a fiction writer, literary consultant, state arts ambassador, and speaker, whose short stories and excerpts from her work-in-progress, Where the Spirit Meets the Bone, have appeared in Callaloo, Potomac Review, a Special Fiction and Poetry edition of City Paper– Baltimore, and anthologies The Spirit of Pregnancy and Street Lights: Illuminating Tales of the Urban Black Experience.
Ms. Du Pree is the Executive Director of CityLit Project, a small literary nonprofit that nurtures readers and writers throughout the region. She was appointed to the Maryland State Arts Council, served as the Vice Chair, and the Chair of the Diversity Outreach Committee, and completes a six-year stint as a counselor in 2017. She’s currently on the One Maryland One Book Selection Committee (a second time), and has served as a county and state judge for the flourishing Poetry Out Loud, NEA’s national poetry competition. She produced Raising Our Voices: Womyn Out Loud, a reading devoted to diverse voices. Ms. Du Pree’s speaking engagements include tributes to Maya Angelou, Toni Morrison – all with the Furious Flower Poetry Center, The Baltimore Arts Society, in a tribute to Lucille Clifton, and the Baltimore debut of Listen to Your Mother speaker series. Ms. Du Pree has spoken before the National Association of State Arts Agencies (NASAA) about the benefits and necessity of diversity and inclusivity, and worked as a parent liaison for the Howard County public middle schools. She was an adjunct professor and independent thesis advisor at The Johns Hopkins University part-time graduate writing seminars in Fiction.
For her work in progress, Ms. Du Pree is the recipient of a 2016 Rubys Artist Project Grant in the literary arts, a 2017 Poetry Foundation Fellow, a 2017 Virginia Center for the Creative Arts Fellow, and won a Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Award in Fiction in 2007. As Founding Fiction Editor of Shooting Star Review, she edited the most sought after issue in the 14 year history of the literary magazine. She’s written, directed and produced two plays (The Era of Black Women at the University of Pittsburgh and Believe for 45 middle schoolers at a Howard County private school), and happily joined a women’s conversation about fashion by contributing to Women in Clothes, edited by Sheila Heti, Heidi Julavits, and Leanne Shapton. In 2010, she was invited to join an illustrious group of literary scholars, poets and writers called Wintergreen Women. Ms. Du Pree is the former executive director of HoCoPoLitSo and producer of The Writing Life. She holds a Masters Degree in Creative Writing from The Johns Hopkins University. An avid arts advocate, she supports artists nationally and throughout the state, and continues to empower women artists.
Hometown
Willingboro, New Jersey
Cultural Pursuits
Literature
Hidden Skill
Jewelry making
Secretly wants to be a…
A filmmaker— if I had time, and because stories come to me visually.
An astronomer in another life, because I have always looked at the sky with true wonder.