Biography

Katherine Soniat's chapbook The Goodbye Animals, winner of The Turtle Island Quarterly Chapbook Prize, is recently out from Foothills Press (2014). Her fifth collection of poems, The Swing Girl, (Louisiana State University Press) was selected as Best Collection of 2011 by the Poetry Council of North Carolina, and A Shared Life was awarded The Iowa Poetry Prize (University of Iowa Press) and a Virginia Prize for Poetry. Other publications include A Raft, A Boat, A Bridge, Dream Horse Press (2012); Alluvial (Bucknell University Press); Cracking Eggs (University Presses of Florida). Notes of Departure received the Camden Poetry Prize (Walt Whitman Center for the Arts and Humanities). Other chapbook publications include Winter Toys (Green Tower Press) and The Fire Setters (WebDelSol's Chapbook Series).

Bright Stranger was published in spring 2016, by Louisiana State University 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.