Associate Professor of English/Creative Writing, and Garrett Fellow

Office: Olin 231
Telephone: (509) 527-5186
Fax: (509) 527-5039
E-mail: robertkc@whitman.edu

Katrina Roberts received her A.B. from Harvard University (1987) and her M.F.A. from the Iowa Writers' Workshop (1990). Before coming to Whitman, she taught a range of literature and writing classes at Boston University, Harvard University Extension School, Bard College, the College of the Holy Cross, University of Southern Maine, Keene State College, and the University of Iowa. She remains affiliated with the Institute for Writing & Thinking at Bard College, with the Northwest Writers Institute (& the Fir Acres Program) at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Oregon, and with Portland State University's Haystack Program in Cannon Beach, Oregon.

Her first book, How Late Desire Looks, received the Peregrine Smith Poetry Prize and was published by Gibbs-Smith in 1997. Her second book of poems, The Quick, was selected by MacArthur fellow Linda Bierds as part of the Pacific Northwest Poetry Series (University of Washington Press 2005.) Her work appears in anthologies including The Pushcart Prize Anthology, The Best American Poetry, The Bread Loaf Anthology of New American Poets, Contemporary Northwest Poets, Life on the Line, and Never Before: Poems About First Experiences. In addition, her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in literary journals such as: Ploughshares; New England Review; ORION; New Orleans Review; Sonora Review; The Boston Book Review; The Journal; RUNES,A Review of Poetry; Smartish Pace; Antioch Review; The North Atlantic Review; and The Southern Poetry Review, and are recorded on One Side of the River, a 2 CD anthology set produced in 1997 by Say That! Productions in Cambridge, Massachusetts. "Undercurrent," appears in Short Takes: Brief Encounters with Creative Nonfiction, ed. Judith Kitchen (W.W. Norton, 2005.) Recipient of various travel grants and funding from organizations such as the St. Botolph Society and Massachusetts Cultural Council, she has lived overseas in Wales, France, Switzerland, and Italy. Other recognitions include a Pushcart Prize, the Painted Bride Quarterly Prize, and two Garrison Medals. She was Theodore Morrison Poetry Scholar at Bread Loaf Writers' Conference and has been a resident at the MacDowell Colony in New Hampshire. Current pursuits include work on another book of poems, as well as on a collection of lyric essays. Other plans for future work include continued collaborative projects with visual artists on the east coast as well as here in Walla Walla.

Katrina Roberts directs the Visiting Writers Reading Series here on campus — bringing established and emerging writers to share work with the community. She's been a faculty advisor at various times in the last several years to The Blue Moon, and Scraps, and has been involved in reading for the One Act Play Contest. Recipient (with Prawin Adhikari) of the 2003 Adam Dublin Award for the study of Global Multiculturalism, she has overseen a wide range of independent study projects. She teaches a variety of writing and literature courses.