bio / contact

Hartsock_Katie-153
photo by Lisa Mancuso Horn

Katie Hartsock grew up around Youngstown, Ohio, where Mill Creek Park remains one of her favorite places in the world. Her debut poetry collection, Bed of Impatiens (2016), was a finalist for the Able Muse Book Award. Her second book of poems, Wolf Trees, is forthcoming in 2023 from Able Muse Press. She is an associate professor of English at Oakland University, where she teaches creative writing, English literature, and classical mythology. She lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan, with her husband and their two young sons.

Her work appears in journals such as Kenyon Review, Ecotone, POETRY, 32 Poems, Thrush,  The Greensboro Review, Image, Arion, Iron Horse Literary Review, Pleiades, Birmingham Poetry Review, MER, Dappled Things, Nimrod, and Rattle’s Poets Respond, is forthcoming in The Threepenny Review,  Oxford Poetry, RHINO, The New Criterion, The Raintown Review, and Plume.  Her current projects include Songs of the Iliad, a hybrid text combining translation with vignettes of the epic’s ancient audiences and creative commentary.  Selections of her translations of Homer appeared in Exchanges: Journal of Literary Translation.

She holds a PhD in Comparative Literary Studies from Northwestern University. Her dissertation was entitled, “The Past Like Never Before: Classical Women in Revisionary Poetry from Euripides and Ovid to H.D., Rita Dove, and Carol Ann Duffy.”  She received a MFA from the University of Michigan, where she received the major Hopwood graduate award in poetry, and a BA in English Literature with a minor in Classics from the University of Cincinnati. She served as the editor of #WordsForResilience, a community literary project addressing the Covid-19 pandemic from Oakland University’s Center for Public Humanities. She has taught at Northwestern University and University of Michigan’s Helen Zell Writers Program.

She can be contacted at hartsock [at] oakland dot edu

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Listen to WCBN’s T Hetzel interview poet Jennifer Metsker and me on The Living Writers show; so grateful to talk with these two amazing writers! (show starts at 00:45)

“Hartsock’s book has very little to do with a literal bed of flowers, but rather more to do with lying down in a bed of various desires that requires or inspires a restless (and lyrically fruitful) impatience” : a review of Bed of Impatiens at NewPages.com ~

“All bound up with Saint Augustine, ambiguity, and bedrooms”: interview with RHINO poetry journal

On translating abandonment into abandon: contributor spotlight for Midwestern Gothic