Kathleen Flenniken's poems have appeared in Poetry, The Iowa Review, The Southern Review, Mid-American Review, Farm Pulp, Prairie Schooner, and Poetry Daily. She is the recipient of a 2005 Literary Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and a 2003 Literary Fellowship from Artist Trust, along with grants from Artist Trust and Seattle Office of Arts and Culture. Her first collection of poems, Famous, winner of the 2005 Prairie Schooner Prize, was released by University of Nebraska Press in 2006, and has been named a Notable Book of the Year by the American Library Association (ALA).

Kathleen is a co-editor and president of Floating Bridge Press, an all-volunteer non-profit press dedicated to publishing Washington State poets.  She’s taught poetry in the schools through the Washington State Arts Commission, Writers in the Schools, Powerful Partners, Northwest School, and led poetry workshops for students of all ages.

I grew up in Richland, in Eastern Washington. I am a Northwesterner through and through, a daughter of Oregonians. I moved to Seattle in my twenties to marry, and my husband and I live here still with our three children.

I came to poetry late, after earning B.S. and M.S. degrees in Civil Engineering from Washington State University and University of Washington, and working eight years as an engineer and hydrologist, three on the Hanford Nuclear Reservation. I started writing when I quit work to stay home with our children. I took a night class in poetry—and I’ve taken it seriously ever since.

For years my subject has been my domestic, ordinary life. I saw myself as a natural historian of interiors. This is the focus of Famous. My work recently has taken a turn, and I am in the midst of a series of poems about growing up near and working at Hanford, where plutonium was produced for the atomic bomb. The new work is fueled by my growing distress about my country’s future.