User:Kathleendriskell/sandbox

Life

Kathleen Driskell was born in Indianapolis, Indiana. She graduated with a B.A. in English from The University of Louisville in 1988, where she was the recipient of scholarships for her creative writing and studied with Leon V. Driskell and Sena Jeter Naslund. Driskell received an M.F.A. in Writing with an emphasis in poetry from the University of North Carolina Greensboro in 1991; her teachers at UNCG were Fred Chappell, Robert Watson, and Alan Shapiro. She served as co-poetry editor of [|The Greensboro Review] with fellow student [|Claudia Emerson], with whom she enjoyed a close friendship until Emerson's death in 2015. Driskell and Emerson were admitted into the UNCG MFA program together in 1988 with fellow student Gabriel Spera

After attending UNCG, Kathleen, and her husband Terry Driskell, moved to Louisville, Kentucky, where since 1994 they have lived in an old country church built before The American Civil War. The church is the subject of her poetry book Seed Across Snow. The graveyard next to the church inspired her book of poems Next Door to the Dead.

Career

Since 2003, Driskell has been a director of and taught in the low-residency M.F.A. in Writing Program at Spalding University. Colleagues in the Spalding MFA Program have included the writers Molly Peacock, Silas House, and Crystal Wilkinson. She also taught at the University of North Carolina Greensboro, the University of Louisville, and Elon College, as well as other institutions. She has been a visiting writer at the Middle Tennessee State University, the University of Southern Indiana, The University of Pittsburgh-Bradford and Murray State University. From 2003 to 2016, she served as Associate Editor of The Louisville Review. In 1996, she founded the Kentucky Writers Coalition, Inc. a writers network with over 2,000 members, with other Kentucky literary activists, and served as its Executive Director from 1996 to 2003. Driskell was a contributing writer to WFPL 89.3 FM, the Louisville National Public Radio affiliate.

In 2008, she founded the Low-Residency MFA Program Directors' Caucus, which meets every year at the national conference of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs. A workgroup of the Low-Residency MFA caucus developed the AWP Hallmarks of an Effective Low-Residency MFA Program in Creative Writing. The group also surveyed the low-residency directors and published the first survey of low-residency programs in the US.

Works

Driskell’s first collection of poetry Laughing Sickness was selected in 1999 by editor Sena Jeter Naslund to be published by Fleur-de-Lis Press of Louisville. Laughing Sickness went into a second printing. Her second collection Seed Across Snow was published in 2009 by Red Hen Press of Los Angeles and was listed twice as a national bestseller by the Poetry Foundation. The University Press of Kentucky published her third book Next Door to the Dead: Poems in 2015 as part of its Kentucky Voices Series. In 2016, Red Hen published her fourth book Blue Etiquette:Poems.

Driskell's poems have appeared in many nationally known literary magazines including North American Review, The Southern Review, Shenandoah, Cortland Review, and Rattle, and in The Kentucky Anthology, What Comes Down to Us: 25 Contemporary Kentucky Poets, as well as online on Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, and American Life in Poetry.

External links[edit] Spalding University's Low Residency MFA in Writing Program Red Hen's Website University Press of Kentucky