Charles Rafferty

Charles Rafferty is an American poet. In 2009 he received a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. His poetry has appeared in The New Yorker, O: Oprah Magazine, Prairie Schooner, and Ploughshares, among other magazines, websites, and anthologies. He co-directs Albertus Magnus College's MFA in Creative Writing program, and teaches at the Westport Writers’ Workshop. As of 2021, he lives in Sandy Hook, Connecticut.

Rafferty had aspired to being a poet since high school. He began writing fiction around his late forties. He views himself as someone who "primarily...writes impressionistic, associative prose poems."

Books

Poetry Collections

• The Wave That Will Beach Us Both (Still Waters Press, 1994)
• The Man on the Tower (University of Arkansas Press, 1995); winner of the Arkansas Poetry Award
• The Bog Shack (Picadilly Press, 1996)
• A Darkness With Brighter Stars (Picadilly Press, 2000)
• Where the Glories of April Lead (Mitki/Mitki Press, 2001)
• A Trayful of Brimming Martinis (Picadilly Press, 2003)
• During the Beauty Shortage (M2 Press, 2005)
• A Less Fabulous Infinity (Louisiana Literature Press, 2006)
• The Unleashable Dog (Steel Toe Books, 2014)
• DIMINUTION (Paper Nautilus Press, 2016)
• The Smoke of Horses (BOA Editions, 2017)
• Something An Atheist Might Bring Up At a Cocktail Party (Mayapple Press, 2018)
• Appetites (Clemson University Press, 2018)
• The Problem with Abundance (Grayson Books, 2019)
• Somebody Who Knows Somebody (Gold Wake Press Collective, 2021)
• A Cluster of Noisy Planets (BOA, 2021)

Short-story collections

• Saturday Night at Magellan's (Fomite, 2013)
• Somebody Who Knows Somebody (Gold Wake, 2021)

Novel

• Moscodelphia (Woodhall Press, 2021)