Intensity and innovation are my goals in all forms of art. The "forms" of art that interest me are those that push on the borders of genre, discipline, and publication/exhibition. I am involved with on-going projects in collaboration with anthropologists, scientists, artists and computer code creators—I am the editor of A Sense of Place: The Washington State Geospatial Poetry Anthology and one of the founding senior co-editors of Cascadia Chronicle: A Geospatial Journal of Place, Environment, and Imagination.
My poetry manuscript Summer, Posthumous was the sole finalist for the 2012 AWP Award Series in Poetry. One of the contest judges, the wonderful Arthur Sze, had this to say about the manuscript:
“Katharine Whitcomb's poems in Summer, Posthumous braid the inner and outer seasons. Elegiac, meditative, and lyrical, and with elegant formal variety, she writes at the liminal edge between presence and absence. With a keen, observant power, where "a slice of time" is "vibrating and open-ended," she writes a poetry of acuity and grace.
— Arthur Sze, Judge
Current Book Projects in Search of Publishers
- Hotel Poem - book-length "novel" comprised of poetry, creative nonfiction pieces, maps and short fiction whose content is inspired by places in Central and Eastern Europe.
- My Heart It Was A Gun: Poems - new collection of poetry.
- Down To Earth: A Memoir of Sweat, Sex and Poetry in the New Old West.
My "day job" is that of Associate Professor in the English Department at Central Washington University, where I am Coordinator of the English Writing Specialization.
Latest News
Hot off the press! Creative nonfiction writing about my residency and faculty-led study abroad program just out in The Strangest of Theatres: Poets Writing Across Borders, Jared Hawkley, Susan Rich, and Brian Turner eds., McSweeney’s, 2013.
Other news includes:
- Poem The Hanged Man in Narrative magazine, "Poems of the Week: 2012-2013."
- Poem “Murder Mystery” in the Fall & Winter 2011-2012 print issue of Poetry Northwest.
- Profile about Faculty Exchange at the University of Pecs in Pécs, Hungary.