I am a poet and educator. I live in Vermont and teach creative writing at Middlebury College.

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.

My poems have appeared in The Kenyon Review, Colorado Review, New England Review, The Virginia Quarterly Review, The New York Times, and elsewhere. 

Kind things others have said about my writing ::

“Movement of the moon, Earth, and sun; of the rivers; of the poverties and plenitudes of our time to live, and die: this is Eclipse Season’s subject, which Gottshall takes up with the wit, imagination, and essential loneliness of the great surrealist poets. These poems explore the mysterious quotidian and the ordinary miracle, the metamorphoses and dark surprises of natural rhythms. In Karin Gottshall’s wild tunes, we meet a fellow traveler who recognizes that to live and die is common, but to sing of it, as close as we come to the divine.” —Kathy Fagan

“Eclipse Season is a stunning and restless meditation on a speaker tormented (and seduced) by memory, attempting to orient and reckon in the present moment…. Karin Gottshall’s poems are threaded with an almost supernatural loneliness, placing her speaker in a tradition of spiritual reckoning through the wound of unsteady attachment to the turned-away parent: the mother haunts the book and the daughter’s house. The invasion is paradoxical, as it is also a continuous emotional absence. In this way, the speaker’s own loneliness is never her own, is always tinged with another’s. Indeed, there are many eclipses in this book, dark objects that block the light, language, sound, meaning, and lack. But this darkness is, as Gottshall understands, a crucial part of the journey forward in language. Ice and fire, wind and animals—these elements of the living world that speak another kind of language, mingle with the ghosting language of the past. Thus, the task is, as the speaker proclaims in the opening of the book, to ’empty all [her] language into the fire.’ For those of us tormented by memory, this is where real work begins: where the “skull grows large with silence.” I am grateful for this book’s gift of language, as much as its gift of silence.” —Bianca Stone

“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,” forThe 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