I am a poet and educator. I teach poetry writing at Middlebury College, and I also direct the New England Young Writers’ Conference at Bread Loaf.
I received a BA with an emphasis in creative writing from Sarah Lawrence College and an MFA in Writing from Vermont College. My first book, Crocus, won the Poets Out Loud Prize in 2007 and was published by Fordham University Press. My second book, The River Won’t Hold You, won the Ohio State University Press/The Journal Wheeler Prize in 2015. I am also the author of three poetry chapbooks: Flood Letters, Almanac for the Sleepless, and Swan. In 2015 I was honored to receive a Margaret Bridgman Fellowship in Poetry at Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference.
Recent poems have appeared in The Kenyon Review, Colorado Review, Crazyhorse, FIELD, The Gettysburg Review, and elsewhere. My poem More Lies is included in the Poetry Out Loud online anthology, and memorized and performed by dozens of high school students from all over the U.S. each year.
Interviews with me ::
Poetic Justice: The Center for Poetry at RCAH Podcast, November 2018
The Journal, March 24, 2014
Speaking of Marvels, October 17, 2013
Kind things others have said about my writing ::
“I’m so impressed by the intelligence and imagination of this poem, but I’m also grateful for what it can teach me—teach us, as readers—about craft: the integrity of each line, the brilliantly loaded enjambments, the pacing. I’ll come back to this poem again and again.” -Maggie Smith on “Origin Story,” for The Kenyon Review
“The poems [in Crocus]…offer crisp language, language that speaks to new views, felt and therefore inherently worthy ways of reporting, all made forceful by strong and easy narrative guidance. The speaking of these poems throughout, even in their drama, is quiet, making everything that happens all the more unsettling as these ideas reach into us.” –Alberto Ríos
“Gottshall’s speakers are explainers of a kind, storytellers who describe lost worlds with details that are often fresh, precise, and perfect…[her] work creates an eerie universe in which dreams do carry messages, names have magical power, and the soul can slip free from the body at will.” –Lesley Wheeler for The Cortland Review
“The human’s mysterious dual immersion in the world of things and the world of words is yet unsolved; however, Gottshall reminds us…to rejoice, and not sorrow, in the tentative.” –Julie Platt for Mid-American Review
“Karin Gottshall’s poems are compelling invitations to an interior landscape that feels relentlessly surprising. Her poems contain an attention to melancholy that’s startling for its loveliness; here the darkness is tender if unsettling, and the observations feel vital and new.” –Allison Titus
To reach me ::
kgottshall(at)gmail(dot)com