Katherine Orr

Dr. Katherine Orr (formerly Katherine Blackbird) is a Professor who teaches Poetry and Creative Writing in the English Department at Kent State. She is also a member of the Honors College faculty, a mentor to NEOMFA students teaching Creative Writing, and directs Senior Writing Portfolios. Her most recent research focuses on poetry as a modality of healing in those impacted by trauma, especially as infants and pre-cognitive, pre-verbal children, and the way poems and the images they contain mediate between trauma and a livable post-traumatic life. She is recipient of the University Council’s Outstanding Teaching Award and several other performance-based teaching awards. Her chapbook, White Sustenance, was one of the first two to win the Wick Poetry Chapbook Competition, her poems have appeared in The Kenyon Review, The Midwest Quarterly Journal for Contemporary Thought, and many other journals and magazines, and she has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. She is faculty advisor for Kent State University’s literary magazine, Luna Negra, and is associate editor for Arsenic Lobster Poetry Journal. She is the mother of two grown daughters and lives in Burton, Ohio.