Biography:
Kathleen Willard’s poetry projects include a travelogue documenting a month long stay in India, an investigation of St. Francis of Assisi based on relics and art depicting his life, a series of sonnets to Mary Shelley, a mistranslation of Ovid’s Metamorphosis using an early 20th Century high school Latin workbook in addition to documenting her life in northern Colorado. One of her interests is using received forms—dictionary entries, tourist brochures, indexes, lists, newspaper articles, and fairy tales—as structures for her poems.
Her poetry has been influenced by travels to India, Italy, Turkey, Portugal and from growing up in a nomadic career military family.
She received a Masters of Arts in English from Middlebury College’s Breadloaf School of English and a Masters of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from Colorado State University.
Awards include a Fulbright-Hays Fellowship to study in India, a National Endowment of Humanities Fellowship to study the New England Renaissance in Massachusetts, and an Arts Alive Fellowship to support her trip to Turkey. She received a fellowship to travel and write in Lisbon, Portugal at the Disquiet International Literary Program and to be in residence at the Vermont Studio Center.
She has taught creative writing in public schools, colleges, prisons, and senior housing projects.
