Biography
Photography: @rosanneolson.com
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 four full-length collections of poems: The Earth Clock, forthcoming in 2027 from Anhinga Press, 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 by Patricia Smith 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, as well as numerous other residency fellowships at MacDowell, Yaddo, Virginia Center for Creative Arts, Vermont Studio Center and others. She received several international awards: an AWP Fellowship in Poetry to the Prague Summer Seminars at Charles University in the Czech Republic, an Artist-in-Residence Fellowship at Oberpfälzer Künstlerhaus in Germany, and two Residency Fellowships at Moulin à Nef in France.
Her work has been published in many journals including Narrative, The Paris Review, The Yale Review, The Kenyon Review, Bennington Review, terrain.org, and The Missouri Review as well as anthologies, including Cascadia Field Guide, Renga for Obama, Fire on Her Tongue, Making Poems, and Dorothy Parker’s Elbow: Tattoos on Writers, Writers on Tattoos.
She is Distinguished Professor of Creative Writing in the English Department at Central Washington University and makes her home in northern Vermont.