Biography

Katherine Soniat's fifth collection of poems,The Swing Girl, is recently out from Louisiana State University Press and a sixth collection, A Raft, A Boat, A Bridge, will be published by Dream Horse Press in fall, 2012. Other publications include The Fire Setters (on-line Chapbook Series, WebDelSol), Alluvial (Bucknell UP). A Shared Life (Iowa UP) won the Iowa Prize and a Virginia Prize for Poetry, selected by Mary Oliver; Cracking Eggs (University Presses of Florida). Notes of Departure received the Camden Poetry Prize (Walt Whitman Center for the Arts and Humanities) and was selected by Sonia Sanchez.  A chapbook, Winter Toys, was published by Green Tower Press.

She is the recipient of two Virginia Commission for the Arts Grants, a William Faulkner Award, a Jane Kenyon Award, Anne Stanford Award, and Fellowships to Yaddo, The MacDowell Colony, and to the Bread Loaf Writers Conference. Her work has been published in such journals as TriQuarterly, Poetry, Crazyhorse, Gettysburg Review, Antioch Review, New England Review, Kenyon Review, The Nation, New Republic, Georgia Review, and The Southern Review.

Originally from New Orleans, she has taught at the University of New Orleans, Hollins University, and for twenty years was on the faculty at Virginia Tech. The sense of place is central to her work and she travels widely to immerse herself in various cultures so that they become transformative filters for more personal contexts. Crete, the Andes, the Bavarian Alps, and the Grand Canyon are a few of these regions she has included in her writing.  Expanding the focus of poetry in such a way allows threads of art, myth, history, geography, and geology to inform her collections, shaping sequences of poems that resonate across a broad but personal spectrum.

Photography, use of archetypal imagery and dream work are also special areas of interests in both teaching and in her own writing. She now lives on a beautiful ravine with one frequently-noted bear (The Kenilworth Bear) in Asheville, North Carolina, and teaches in the Great Smokies Writers' Program at the University of North Carolina at Asheville.