PHOTOS/BIOS

 Kathleen Driskell, Author Photos. Credits: Julia Youngblood

"Keats in Your Time of Pandemic," essay, winner of the Denny C. Plattner Award and noted in Best American Essays 2021.

Kathleen Driskell, Elected to third term as  AWP Chair

Press Release "Award-winning Poet and Spalding Professor of Creative Writing Kathleen Driskell Publishes Her Fourth Book of Poetry: Blue Etiquette." September 14, 2016.

University Press of Kentucky Press Release: "The Dead Talk Back," July 17, 2015

Author Q & A: "A Conversation with Kathleen Driskell."

BIO 250 Words

Kathleen Driskell is an award-winning poet, essayist, and teacher. She is the author or editor of eight books. Her newest poetry collection is The Vine Temple, a chapbook title from Carnegie-Mellon University Press. Other collections include Blue Etiquette: Poems (Red Hen Press 2016), a Weatherford Prize finalist; Next Door to the Dead, (UPKY 2015), winner of the Judy Gaines Book Award; Seed Across Snow (Red Hen 2009), listed as a national bestseller by the Poetry Foundation.

Her poems and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in many nationally known literary journals including The New Yorker, River Teeth, Appalachian Review, Shenandoah, Southern Review, North American Review, and Rattle and are featured online on Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, and in American Life in Poetry. Her work has been anthologized in What Comes Down to Us: 20 Contemporary Kentucky Poets and The Kentucky Anthology. In 2021, her essay "Keats in Your Time of Pandemic," won the Denny C. Plattner Award and was noted as a top essay in Best American Essays, 2021. 

Past chair of the AWP Board (2019-22), Kathleen is professor of Creative Writing and Chair of the Naslund-Mann Graduate School of Writing at Spalding University, home of the nationally distinguished low-residency MFA in Writing Program. An Al Smith Fellow of the Kentucky Arts Council, Kathleen lives with her family in an old country church built before the Civil War.

BIO 150 Words

Kathleen Driskell is an award-winning poet and teacher. She is the author of five books including The Vine Temple, a chapbook title from Carnegie-Mellon University Press, Blue Etiquette: Poems and Next Door to the Dead. Her poems and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in many nationally known literary journals including The New Yorker, River Teeth, Appalachian Review, Shenandoah,  Southern Review, Rattle and are featured online on Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, and in American Life in Poetry. Her work has been anthologized in What Comes Down to Us: 20 Contemporary Kentucky Poets and The Kentucky Anthology. Past chair of the AWP Board (2019-22), Kathleen is professor of Creative Writing and Chair of the Naslund-Mann Graduate School of Writing at Spalding University, home of the nationally distinguished low-residency MFA in Writing Program.