Ilustration: @Michael Woloshinow/marlenagency.com
Photography: @rosanneolson.com
About Katharine
Katharine Whitcomb was born in Appleton, Wisconsin, and earned her B.A. from Macalester College in English. In 1995 she received an MFA in Writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts. She was a Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford University from 1996-1998. She is the author of three full-length collections of poems: Habitats, published in 2024 by Poetry Northwest Editions in the Possession Sound Series, The Daughter’s Almanac, which was chosen as the winner of the Backwaters Prize and published by The University of Nebraska Press/The Backwaters Press; Saints of South Dakota & Other Poems, which was chosen by Lucia Perillo as the winner of the Bluestem Award and published by Bluestem Press; and two poetry chapbooks, Hosannas (Parallel Press) and Lamp of Letters (Floating Bridge Press), winner of the 2009 Floating Bridge Chapbook Award.
She is the co-author, with the artist Brian Goeltzenleuchter, of The Art Courage Program, a parody self-help book and art piece, published by Jaded Ibis Press in 2014. In addition to the Stegner Fellowship, her awards include a Loft-McKnight Award, a Writing Fellowship at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and a Halls Fellowship at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing.
My Books
I write books to understand myself. I write poetry to capture intensity of feeling, to examine the networks of cohesion that exist everywhere, and to marvel. My books are available from their publishers and from Bookshop.org. I am deeply grateful to share my work with readers around the world.
The Daughter’s Almanac
Winner of the 2014 Backwaters Prize, chosen by Patricia Smith, University of Nebraska Press
The Art Courage Program
A faux-self-help art project, co-authored with Brian Goeltzenleuchter, https://jadedibispress.com/product/art-courage-program/
ABOUT HABITATS
Habitats, Katharine Whitcomb’s robust new collection, is her best yet-a field guide to the pleasures and perils of adulthood, a reckoning with what is and what will never be. Moving through disappointment and joy, divorce and remarriage, the death of parents and a stare down with her own allotted time on Earth, Whitcomb seeks out or stumbles into rooms of reflection, landscapes that enlarge us, gardens and clearings where “lean and stubborn devotions” take root. These lush and rugged poems are alive to the “tug of memory / awake in everything,” those habitats of geography and mind that clarify and define what is most important-belonging to ourselves. “Not young or uncomplicated or down-to-earth,” Whitcomb is both realist and dreamer, uncovering the “mercy in each minute of the sense’s deft erasure.” Niche by niche, line by line, she “persists in loving the world,” finding wherever she looks a certain hard-won grace, not wanting to be “anyone or anywhere else.” Habitats is many worlds at once-a marvelous journey into the powers of ordinary witness and a testament of the courage to change.
