Traci Brimhall’s next collection, Love Prodigal, will be published by Copper Canyon Press in 2024. She is the author of four other collections of poetry: Come the Slumberless to the Land of Nod (Copper Canyon Press, 2020); Saudade (Copper Canyon Press, 2017); Our Lady of the Ruins (W.W. Norton, 2012), selected by Carolyn Forché for the 2011 Barnard Women Poets Prize; and Rookery (Southern Illinois University Press, 2010), selected by Michelle Boisseau for the 2009 Crab Orchard Series in Poetry First Book Award and finalist for the ForeWord Book of the Year Award. Her children’s book, Sophia & The Boy Who Fell, was published by SeedStar Books in March 2017.
Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, New England Review, Ploughshares, Orion The Believer, The Nation, The New Republic and New York Times Magazine. Her essays have appeared in Georgia Review, The Southern Review, Prairie Schooner, Gulf Coast, Copper Nickel, and Brevity. Some of her work has also been featured on Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, Best of the Net, PBS Newshour, and Best American Poetry 2013 & 2014. She has also received the Just Desserts Short Fiction Prize from Passages North (selected by Roxane Gay), the Annie Dillard Award for Creative Nonfiction from Bellingham Review (selected by Sue William Silverman), the Jane Geske Award for poetry from Prairie Schooner (selected by Kwame Dawes), the Cecil Hemley Award from the Poetry Society of America (selected by Sally Wen Mao), and a Pushcart Prize.
Her poetry comic collaborations with Eryn Cruft can be found in Guernica, The Poetry Comics, and Nashville Review. Her poetry comic crown of sonnets with Eryn Cruft, The Wrong Side of Rapture, was released through Ninth Letter in the summer of 2013. She is also a co-author of two collaborative chapbooks with Brynn Saito: Bright Power, Dark Peace (Diode Editions, 2013) and Wild Recovery (Tupelo Press, 2020).
In 2023, she received an Artist-in-Residence position through the National Parks Service at Bighorn Canyon, as well as the My Time fellowship from the Writers Colony at Dairy Hollow. She has also received a 2013 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship in Poetry, the 2012 Summer Poet in Residence at the University of Mississippi, and the 2008-2009 Jay C. and Ruth Halls Poetry Fellowship at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing. Other awards for her work include scholarships and fellowships to the Breadloaf Writers’ Conference, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, The Writer’s Center of Bethesda, Vermont Studio Center, the Disquiet International Literary Program, the Arctic Circle Residency, and the SWWIM/Betsy Hotel Residency. Additionally, she’s received the Karnes Fellowship from Purdue Libraries to research Amelia Earhart’s unpublished poems and the Mortem residency through Ayatana Biophilium for interdisciplinary thanatology studies.
She holds degrees from Florida State University (BA), Sarah Lawrence College (MFA), and Western Michigan University (PhD). She’s a University Distinguished Professor at Kansas State University, where she directs the creative writing program and holds the Donnelly Faculty Award in English. She also serves as the Poet Laureate for the state of Kansas (2023-2026).
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Image credit: Jain Basil Aliyas. Licensed under CC BY 2.0.
Traci Brimhall 