Katherine Larson

Katherine Larson’s first book, Radial Symmetry, was selected by Louise Glück as winner of the 2010 Yale Series of Younger Poets and published by Yale University Press in 2011. The collection was subsequently awarded the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, the Levis Reading Prize, and Foreword’s Best Poetry Book of the Year. Her second book, The Speechless Ones (Interlinea Press, 2016), was selected for the UNESCO City of Vercelli International Civic Poetry Prize for its emphasis on writing that embraces the ecological imperative for social change (other recipients of the prize include Adam Zagajewski and Yevgeny Yevtushenko). She is the recipient of a Ruth Lilly Fellowship, an Arizona Commission for the Arts Research and Development Grant, and the Union League Civic and Arts Foundation Poetry Prize.

Larson’s poems and essays have appeared in journals such as AGNI, Alaska Quarterly Review, Blackbird, Boulevard, Crab Orchard Review, The Kenyon Review, The Maine Review, The Massachusetts Review, Notre Dame Review, Orion, Poetry, Poetry Daily, Poetry Northwest, and The Scientist. Her work has also been anthologized in Read America(s) and Prentice Hall’s Literature: An Introduction to Reading and Writing, and translated into Norwegian, Portuguese, Albanian, Polish, Italian and Spanish.

Larson volunteers her time as a PEN America Prison Writing Program Mentor and is active with organizations and artists dedicated to conservation, sustainable development, and environmental education in the Gulf of California. She has spent years working in the field of molecular biology and currently lives in Arizona with her family.

Her third book, a collection of lyric essays, is forthcoming from Milkweed Editions.