KATHRYN KIRKPATRICK was born in Columbia, South Carolina, and grew up in the Philippines, Germany, Texas and the Carolinas. Educated at Winthrop University and UNC-Chapel Hill, she holds a Ph.D. in Interdisciplinary Studies from Emory University, where she received an Academy of American Poets poetry prize. Today she lives with her husband, Joseph Conrad scholar William Atkinson, in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina, where she teaches environmental literature, animal studies, and Irish studies as Professor of English at Appalachian State University. Three of her collections of poetry have won the N.C. Poetry Society’s Brockman-Campbell award, one received the Roanoke-Chowan Poetry Prize from the North Carolina Literary and Historical Association, and another was a finalist for the Southern Independent Booksellers Association poetry award.
Kathryn Kirkpatrick’s poetry has been included in anthologies and readers, including Facing the Change: Personal Encounters with Global Warming; Animal Companions, Animal Doctors, Animal People; Don’t Leave Hungry: Fifty Years of Southern Poetry Review; Cadence of Hooves: A Celebration of Horses; Poetry from Sojourner: A Feminist Anthology; and The Carol Adams Reader.
As a literary scholar in Irish studies and the environmental humanities, Kirkpatrick has published essays on class trauma, ecofeminist poetics, and animal studies in New Hibernia Review, Eire-Ireland, Canadian Journal of Irish Studies, An Sionnach, Irish University Review and other journals. Her reviews of the work of other writers have appeared in Irish Literary
Supplement, Shenandoah, Calyx: A Journal of Art and Literature by Women, ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, and South Carolina Review.