Traci Brimhall
Traci Brimhall is an American poet of remarkable range, ambition, and lyric power whose work engages the mythic and the ecological, the erotic and the elegiac, with an intensity that has established her as one of the most compelling voices in contemporary American poetry. Born and raised in the Midwest, Brimhall brings to her poems a sensibility shaped by the natural world, by Christian imagery and mythology, by a fierce attention to the body, and by an ongoing reckoning with loss and transformation. She holds an MFA from Western Michigan University and a PhD, and is a professor of creative writing at Kansas State University.
Her debut collection, Rookery (2010), won the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry First Book Award and announced her as a poet with an unusually assured voice and a gift for sustained lyric argument. Her second collection, Our Lady of the Ruins (2012), selected by Carolyn Forche for the Barnard Women Poets Prize, extended her engagement with myth, violence, and the sacred, building a visionary world that draws on both religious and secular iconography. Saudade (2013) introduced new tonal and geographical range, exploring the Portuguese concept of longing through poems set in Brazil and drawing on its landscapes and myths. Her collection Come the Slumberless to the Land of Nod (2021), published by Copper Canyon Press, received wide critical acclaim for its stunning meditations on grief, parenthood, and the persistence of beauty in a broken world.
Brimhall has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Amy Lowell Poetry Travelling Scholarship, and the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing. Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, Ploughshares, The Kenyon Review, and many other journals, and she has been widely anthologized. She is recognized not only as a major poet but as an important teacher and mentor to younger writers.
Brimhall’s poetry operates at a high pitch of emotional and linguistic intensity that can feel overwhelming and is meant to. She is a poet who takes seriously the darkness of human experience without losing sight of the possibility of redemption, and who finds in the natural world a theater for the enactment of the soul’s most extreme conditions. Her work is among the most exciting and necessary in American poetry today.