Thursday, March 14, 7:30 p.m.
$7 / $5 for BMCM+AC members & students
Join us for an evening of poetry with three celebrated WNC poets with recently published collections: Kathryn Stripling Byer, Kathryn Kirkpatrick and Katherine Soniat.
Kathryn Stripling Byer was raised on a farm in southwest Georgia, where the material for much of her first poetry originated. She received her MFA degree from UNC-Greensboro, where she studied with Fred Chappell and Robert Watson. After graduation she worked at Western Carolina University, becoming Poet-in-Residence in 1990. Her work has been published in Hudson Review, Poetry, The Atlantic, Georgia Review, Shenandoah, and Southern Poetry Review. and was discussed along with that of Charles Wright, Robert Morgan, Fred Chappell, Jeff Daniel Marion, and Jim Wayne Miller in Six Poets from the Mountain South, by John Lang, published by LSU Press. Her first book of poetry, The Girl in the Midst of the Harvest, was published in the AWP Award Series in 1986, followed by the Lamont (now Laughlin) prize-winning Wildwood Flower, from LSU Press. Her subsequent collections have been published in the LSU Press Poetry Series, receiving the Hanes Poetry Award from the Fellowship of Southern Writers, the Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance Poetry Award, and the Roanoke-Chowan Award. She served for five years as North Carolina’s first woman poet laureate.
Kathryn Kirkpatrick lives in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina, where she currently holds a dual appointment at Appalachian State University as a Professor in the English Department and the Sustainable Development Program. She has a Ph.D. in Interdisciplinary Studies from Emory University, where she received an Academy of American Poets poetry prize. Her poetry collections include The Body’s Horizon (1996), which was selected by Alicia Ostriker for the Brockman-Campbell award; Beyond Reason (2004), which was awarded the Roanoke-Chowan Poetry Prize by the North Carolina Literary and Historical Association; Out of the Garden (2007), which was a finalist for the Southern Independent Booksellers Association poetry award; Unaccountable Weather (Press53, 2011), and Our Held Animal Breath, just out from WordTech Editions. As a literary scholar in Irish studies and the environmental humanities, she has published essays on class trauma, eco-feminist poetics, and animal studies.
Katherine Soniat’s sixth collection of poetry—A Raft, A Boat, A Bridge—is recently out from Dream Horse Press. The Swing Girl, published by Louisiana State University Press, was selected as Best Collection of 2011 by the Poetry Council of North Carolina. A Shared Life won the Iowa Poetry Prize. Her work has appeared recently in Women’s Review of Books, Hotel Amerika and Crazyhorse, among others. She teaches in the Great Smokies Writers Program at UNC-Asheville. Website: www.katherinesoniat.com
