Carlson-Wee received an MFA in Poetry from the
University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2011. He was awarded a
Wallace Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University in 2011, and a
Jones Lectureship in Poetry in 2013. and in 2023 he received a
Pushcart Prize. Carlson-Wee's writing has been published in
The Kenyon Review, Tin House, Ploughshares, The Academy of American Poets, Literary Hub, and The Southern Review. His debut collection of poems, RAIL, was published by
BOA Editions in 2018, and was praised for its "authentic voice" and "gritty" depictions of life on the road. In the foreword to the book,
Nick Flynn describes it as "biblical" and compares it to works by
Larry Levis and
Sam Shephard.
Campell McGrath named Carlson-Wee a "worthy inheritor" of "the great American bardic tradition", comparing him to
Walt Whitman and
Jack Kerouac. His documentary film, Riding the Highline, received the Special Jury Prize at the Napa Valley Film Festival, and the Shoestring Award at the Rochester International Film Festival. The film follows Carlson-Wee and his brother hopping freight trains on the Burlington Highline route from Minneapolis, Minnesota to Wenatchee, Washington. ==Writing approach and style==