Kathleen Flenniken's poems have appeared in Poetry, The Iowa Review, The Southern Review, Farm Pulp, Prairie Schooner, The Writer’s Almanac, 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. In 2002 she was a Jack Straw Writer. Her first collection of poems, Famous, winner of the 2005 Prairie Schooner Prize, was released by University of Nebraska Press in 2006 and named a 2007 Notable Book of the Year by the American Library Association (ALA) and a finalist for the Washington State Book Award. Flenniken received a 2008 GAP Award from Artist Trust for her second manuscript, Atomic City.
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 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 poetryand I’ve taken it seriously ever since. I completed my MFA in Creative Writing from Pacific Lutheran University in 2007.
For years my subject has been my daily domestic life. I saw myself as a natural historian of interiors. This is the focus of Famous. In 2004 I started (without recognizing it at first) a very different project, and for the last four years I have written almost exclusively about Hanford, where plutonium was produced for 40 years, and its bedroom community, my home town, Richland, Washington. Atomic City, the resulting full-length manuscript, is part memoir, part history lesson, part cautionary tale, part quest. It is fueled as much by the disastrous policies and secrets perpetrated by the Bush administration as it is by the troubling history of Hanford. I’ve learned enormously from a sustained examination of one all-consuming subject. But slowly I’m emerging from my work on Hanford and writing again on a variety of American themes.