Kathleen Driskell, MFA

About Kathleen

Kathleen Driskell is the author of six poetry collections, most recently Goat-Footed Gods (Carnegie Mellon University Press). Her other collections include The Vine Temple; Blue Etiquette: Poems, a finalist for the Weatherford Award; Next Door to the Dead, a Kentucky Voices selection by the University Press of Kentucky and winner of the 2018 Judy Gaines Young Book Award; Seed Across Snow, a Poetry Foundation national bestseller; Laughing Sickness; and Peck and Pock: A Graphic Poem. Individual poems and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, Rattle, River Teeth, Appalachian Review, The Southern Review, Shenandoah, and North American Review and have been featured in anthologies and online at Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, and American Life in Poetry. She was awarded the Appalachian Review 2020 Denny C. Plattner Award in Creative Nonfiction for an essay that was also listed as Notable in Best American Essays 2020. Other awards include grants from the Kentucky Arts Council and the Kentucky Foundation for Women, and she has received prizes from the Associated Writing Programs and Frankfort Arts Foundation. With Katy Yocom, she co-edited the anthology Creativity & Compassion: Spalding Writers Celebrate Twenty Years. From 2019-22, she served as chair of the board of directors of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs, the largest professional organization of creative writers in the U.S., and she founded and served two terms as chair of the Low-Residency MFA Directors’ Caucus, which meets annually at the national AWP conference. She received the Trustees Outstanding Faculty Award from Spalding University and served as the faculty representative to the Spalding Board of Trustees. Driskell received her MFA in creative writing from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. She was installed as 2025-2027 Kentucky Poet Laureate.