Carter was born in a small Midwestern town that is noted for having been the birthplace of Wendell Willkie, the Republican presidential candidate in 1940. Carter grew up in the shadow of this liberal Republican dark horse who lost the election to the incumbent Roosevelt, but who maintained an international outlook and who is best remembered for his advocacy of "One World." Carter lettered in three sports in high school and still holds his school's record for the 400 meter dash. Following graduation in 1956, he attended Yale and, in later years, Goddard College. At Yale he majored in English literature; at Goddard, American history. After military service and travel abroad in the 1960s, he made his home in Indianapolis, where he has lived since 1969. He worked for many years as an editor and interior designer of textbooks and scholarly works, first with the Bobbs-Merrill Company and later in association with Hackett Publishing Company. He is a fifth-generation Hoosier, descended from anti-slavery North Carolinians and Virginians who migrated to Indiana in the decades following its establishment in 1816 as the nineteenth state. Several of his poems include details taken from the letters, journals, and family stories of his predecessors. Among forebears on his mother's side was Elias Baxter Decker, of Tipton County, Indiana, who fought at Tullahoma, Chickamauga, and Missionary Ridge, and who served with the 75th Indiana Infantry Regiment in the army led by William Tecumseh Sherman, on its March to the Sea from Atlanta to Savannah and points north, in 1864-65. During the Second World War, Carter's father, Robert A. Carter, served with the Seabees from 1943 to 1945, and took part in the construction of airstrips for B-29s on the Island of Tinian in the Marianas. Carter's father-in-law, David P. Haston, was a technician with a B-17 flight wing in the Pacific during that conflict, serving from 1941 to 1945. For his participation in the Battle of Midway he was awarded three bronze stars. On his father's side, Carter is a grand-nephew of the American artist Glen Cooper Henshaw.
Carter writes in free verse and in traditional forms. Much of his early work is set in "Mississinewa County," an imaginary place that includes the actual Mississinewa River, a tributary of the Wabash River. In recent years, as he has published increasingly on the web, his poetry has ranged farther afield. His poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Nation, Poetry, and other journals in the U.S. and abroad. His work has been anthologized in Twentieth-Century American Poetry,Contemporary American Poetry,Writing Poems, and Poetry from Paradise Valley. His first collection, Work, for the Night Is Coming, won the Walt Whitman Award. His second, After the Rain, was given the Poets' Prize. He has received two literary fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Indiana Governor's Arts Award.
Books
The Land Itself. Morgantown, West Virginia: Monongehela Books, 2019.
