Karen Volkman

Discipline: Poetry

Based In: Missoula, MT

Year at Millay: 1998

Awards/Honors: Award Winner, James Laughlin Award, Academy of American Poets (2002); Prize Winner, Iowa Poetry Prize, University of Iowa Press, University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA (2002); Fellow, Literature, Akademie Schloss Solitude, Stuttgart, Germany (1999); Fellow, MacDowell, Peterborough, NH (1997, 1996, 1994); Prize Winner, NPS Open Competition, The National Poetry Series, Lawrenceville, NJ (1995); Grant Recipient, Creative Writing Fellowship Grant, National Endowment for the Arts, Washington, DC (1993).

Website: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karen_Volkman

Karen Volkman earned a BA at New College, an MA at Syracuse University, and completed doctoral work at the University of Houston. Her poetry collections include Crash’s Law (1996), selected for the National Poetry Series by Heather McHugh; Spar (2002), which won the James Laughlin Award and the Iowa Poetry Prize; Nomina (2008); and Whereso (2016). Her poetry has been featured in the anthologies The New American Poets: A Bread Loaf Anthology (2000) and American Poets in the 21st Century: The New Poetics (2007). Full of lush sonic and syntactic moments, Volkman’s work has been lauded for its beauty as well as its difficulty.

Volkman’s honors include a Pushcart Prize and a Gertrude Stein Award in Innovative American Poetry as well as awards and fellowships from the Poetry Society of America, the Bogliasco Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, MacDowell, Yaddo, and the Akademie Schloss Solitude.