Katrina Roberts VanKouwenhoven

Katrina Roberts’ LIKENESS is unlike any book or cloud or sorrow or sanctuary or house or stone or garment or forest or revelry or snowstorm or body or star or needle or lullaby I have ever been inside. It is far more beautiful. And far more real.

–Sabrina Orah Mark, author of Happily

Poet-Artist Katrina Roberts is author of several books of poems: Underdog, and The Quick, (both chosen by MacArthur fellow Linda Bierds as part of the Pacific Northwest Poetry Series published by the University of Washington Press, and finalists for the Washington State Book Award); Friendly Fire (selected by Robin Becker as the winner of the 2007 Idaho Prize in Poetry, also a Washington State Book Award finalist, from Lost Horse Press); How Late Desire Looks (selected by Christopher Merrill as recipient of the Peregrine Smith Poetry Prize, published by Gibbs-Smith Press) ), as well as LIKENESS (full-color poems, from Finishing Line Press, 2022). Her letterpress literary tract Quire # 14: Six Golden Shovels was handset by C. Mikal Oness of The Last Press, 2022); her chapbook Lace was winner of the Floating Bridge Press Chapbook Prize, 2019. As well, Roberts edited the anthology: Because You Asked: A Book of Answers on the Art & Craft of the Writing Life.

Roberts’ poems appear in many anthologies such as: The Pushcart Prize Anthology, Best American Poetry, and The Bread Loaf Anthology of New American Poets.

In addition, her poems are included in collections oriented toward specific themes, such as
place, ecopoetics, and ecology:

CASCADIA, A Field Guide Through Art, Ecology, & Poetry (Mountaineers Books, 2023);
various titles from Keokee Press including: MANY WATERS, THE NATURAL HISTORY of the Walla Walla Valley; THE SEASONS of THE BLUES; and THE BLUES (2018).

WA129 (curated by former WA State poet Laureate Tod Marshall, Sage Hill Press);
and Long Journey: Contemporary Northwest Poets (Oregon State University Press).

Poems curated for intentional form/craft (such as ekphrasis, etc.) appear in the following anthologies, among others:

ONE FOR THE MONEY: The Sentence as a Poetic Form, Lynx House Press.
CRAFT of WRITING, ed. Susan Landgraf. Two Sylvias Press.
RENGA for OBAMA Limited Edition Chapbook, produced by Harvard Review.
56 DAYS OF AUGUST, Five Oaks Press
The MADRONA Project, Art in a Public Voice (Empty Bowl)

Poems gathered around issues of health, motherhood, and life experience appear in anthologies such as:

All We Can Hold, Sage Hill Press
Life on the Line, Negative Capability Press
Never Before: Poems About First Experiences; Four Way Books
Marry a Monster; Scablands Press

Roberts’ poems also appear in journals such as: Quarterly West, Northwest Review; Willow Springs; Pontoon Poetry; SWWIM; Scoundrel Time; New England Review; Women’s Studies Quarterly; Poetry Northwest; and as The Academy of American Poets’ poem-a-day; VANDAL poem-of-the-day, and on The Poetry Foundation site. Roberts writes prose (lyric essays and short fiction), as well. "Undercurrent," appears in Short Takes: Brief Encounters with Creative Nonfiction, ed. Judith Kitchen (W.W. Norton).

Most recently, Roberts has been the Featured Artist in Poetry Northwest, and the Indianapolis Review. Named finalist for the New Alchemy Award, and nominated for a Pushcart prize and Best of the Net for innovative and hybrid visual work, her graphic poems, poetry comics, visual reviews and erasures appear in places such as BOMB; Cleaver; The Ilanot Review; Thrush Poetry Journal; BRINK, INTERIM, Poetry & Poetics; The American Journal of Poetry, Permafrost, Shenandoah; Brooklyn Review; Poetry Northwest; The Journal; ITERANT; The American Journal of Poetry; and in various anthologies including Evergreen: Fairy Tales, Essays, and Fables from the Dark Northwest and Towers & Dungeons/Lilac City Fairy Tales (both from Scablands Books), and CONSTRAINED, Formal & Visual Poetry (from Penteract Press, 2022). Roberts has done illustration work for various publications including Root & Star, and Poetry Northwest; as well as book cover art & design.

Katrina Roberts appears here on the Academy of American Poets page, and here at The Poetry Foundation. To learn more, please visit: www.katrinaroberts.net.

“Not all poets can love a world as alternately beautiful and decayed as ours, and not all poems can sustain us with the complex, far-reaching vision and hope we need. But in Katrina Roberts we have a poet who companions herself to hard histories, to ancient proverbs, and to her own family, and finds in each an endurance to save us into the next day’s reckoning. Underdog is a book that sees, that sees and goes on in spite of what it consequently discerns – which is, we accept, the only way to stay alive.”

—Katie Ford, author of If You Have to Go, and Whitman College graduate