Biography
Poet Kate Northrop earned a BA from the University of Pennsylvania, and an MFA from the University of Iowa.
Northrop’s lyrical poems engage themes of history, loss, and return. In a 2009 interview with Danielle Sellers for The Country Dog Review, Northrop discussed the significance of landscape on her work, and particularly how, to paraphrase Wallace Stegner, living in the west makes her feel both “[m]ore significant, more insignificant: these heights and great distances make me smaller (dwarfed by landscape) and larger (more often alone, far from the crowd). It seems to me I feel more keenly my own boundaries, where I begin and end. […] I can only say it this way -- it’s a feeling of being a bit too stark, too clean.”
Northrop’s collections of poetry include Clean (2011), Things are Disappearing Here (2007), which was a New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice and was also a finalist for the Academy of American Poets’ James Laughlin Award, and Back Through Interruption (2002), which won Kent State University Press’s Stan & Tom Wick Poetry Prize.
A contributing editor for The American Poetry Review, Northrop has received fellowships from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts and the Sewanee Writers’ Conference as well as the Paumanok Poetry Award and the American Academy of Poets Prize.
Northrop has taught at West Chester University and the University of Wyoming.
