Kathleen Flenniken

Kathleen Flenniken’s holds an MFA in creative writing from the Rainier Writing Workshop and was awarded an Emerging Writer’s Fellowship by The Writer’s Center in Bethesda in 2010. She has also been named the Washington State Poet Laureate for 2012-2014, and was featured in CityArts Magazine in 2013. Her first book, Famous (University of Nebraska, 2006), won the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry and was named a Notable Book by the American Library Association and a finalist for the Washington State Book Award. Her poems have appeared in The Iowa Review, Prairie Schooner, Poetry, The Writer’s Almanac, Poetry Daily, American Life in Poetry, and many other journals and anthologies, and on KUOW. Her second collection, Plume, has been selected by Linda Bierds for the Pacific Northwest Poetry Series and will be published in Spring 2012 by University of Washington Press.

Kathleen received 2011 GAP Award funding to cover travel expenses, including all transportation, hotel, and meals for a five-day trip to Washington, D.C. to support and inform Kathleen’s new poems around the subject of love of country. There, Kathleen hopes to meet with her national representatives at the Capitol and perhaps representatives of other parts of the country, explore the seat of the nation’s government, and visit the Smithsonian.

Kathleen received 2008 GAP Award funding for the submission of her book of poetry to competitions. Plume is Kathleen’s second book-length poetry collection and is nearly complete. It is a meditation on the Hanford Nuclear Reservation, both historical and personal, and focuses on the human damage wreaked by government secrets. The manuscript is a departure from her first collection, Famous, which explored the domestic life of a woman at midlife.

Kathleen also received a 2002 GAP Award.