In Fred Chappell’s introduction to The Kelly Cherry Reader, he writes, Cherry is a flambeau example of the extremely conscious artist, a writer who mediates ceaselessly upon the problems and possibilities of the poem, the novel, the short story and the essay. She ponders what she has done and how she has done it; she thinks about the approaches and techniques she has employed, and she labors to extend and expand them. This kind of effort is not common to all writers, many of whom will write this year pretty much the same novel they wrote year before last, the same poem they wrote twenty years ago.

Cherry has long been a writer whose work has remained vital and, due to her diligence, fresh. Here, in the Reader, she collects a body of work, much of it no longer in print, and permits us to remap and re-explore where her writing has come from, where it has gone, and where it is bound yet to go; it reacquaints long-time fans and invites new readers to discover the importance of her work.