Kirsten Kaschock’s poetry addresses the intersections between language and the body. Informed by her study of dance—an art form she describes as “my first instructor in the sublime”—Kaschock displays a choreographer's sense of rhythm and timing in writing that casts social and personal issues against fable-like backdrops. “I do not write confessional poems,” she explains. “Rather than transcribing my lived experience directly, I choose to make-strange the almost-familiar. Why? Because we also need the ineffable.” Confessional Sci-Fi: A Primer, Kaschock’s most recent book of poetry, won the Subito Press Poetry Prize, and her 2014 collection The Dottery won the AWP Donald Hall Prize for Poetry. Kaschock’s writing has been featured in The Iowa Review, BOAAT Press, The Rumpus, and Guernica, among other publications. Kaschock is an assistant teaching professor at Drexel University and the faculty director of Writers Room, a community literary arts program at the university. She holds a PhD in English literature from the University of Georgia and a PhD in dance from Temple University.
