Cheryl Pallant is a poet, author, dancer, performance artist, and professor who lives in Richmond, Virginia. She has published several books of innovative poetry, nonfiction, and has been featured in several anthologies. Her background as a writer and dancer has led to frequently merging these disciplines.
Career
While a literature student at Long Island University, she was introduced to the dance form, contact improvisation. This postmodern improvisational dance has had a strong influence upon her poetics. Thematic frames and syntax shift rhythmically in her poetry, moving from one context to another, the language much like the moves of a dancer. Her books, such as Into Stillness and Uncommon Grammar Cloth, demonstrate a kinetic poetics guided by an internal momentum that expands upon the possibilities of language and challenges the usual logical mode of reading. Morphs, written in collaboration with Grant Jenkins, resulted from a furthering of her language play, a single poem morphed thirty-five times. Her bookon dance, Contact Improvisation: an Introduction to a Vitalizing Dance Form, is considered a primary book in its field. Her ongoing interest in applying a somatic approach to writing and dance led to her popular workshop, Writing From the Body, and to Writing and the Body in Motion, a book on somatic writing, which expands perceptual possibilities. She was performance art critic for and dance critic for Style Weekly, a newspaper in Virginia. Ginseng Tango is her memoir about her time living in South Korea, learning tango, and undergoing a spiritual renewal. Consistent in her work is proprioceptive awareness, meditation, embodiment, consciousness, and language play. Pallant won the Theresa Pollak Prize and was a three-time recipient of a NEH Grant in partnership with the RichmondArts Council. She was selected as Finalist for the Bechtel Prize, among other awards. She was poetry editor for The New Southern Literary Messenger, successor to Southern Literary Messenger, edited by Edgar Allan Poe, and an editor for Contact Quarterly. She has taught at Virginia Commonwealth University, University of Richmond, Keimyung University, and University of Tulsa.
