Catherine Bowman is an American poet

Poet

A poet is a person who writes poetry. A poet's work can be literal, meaning that his work is derived from a specific event, or metaphorical, meaning that his work can take on many meanings and forms. Poets have existed since antiquity, in nearly all languages, and have produced works that vary...

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Her most recent poetry collection is The Plath Cabinet (Four Way Books

Four Way Books

Four Way Books is an American not-for-profit literary press located in New York City, New York, which publishes poetry and short fiction by emerging and established writers. It features the work of the winners of national poetry competitions, as well as collections accepted through general...

, 2009), and her poems have appeared in literary journals and magazines including The Best American Poetry, TriQuarterly, River Styx, Conjunctions, Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, The Los Angeles Times, Crazy Horse, The New Yorker, and The Paris Review, and in six editions of The Best American Poetry

The Best American Poetry

The Best American Poetry series consists of annual poetry anthologies, each containing seventy-five poems.The series, begun by poet and editor David Lehman in 1988, has a different guest editor every year...

. Her honors include fellowships from Yaddo

Yaddo

Yaddo is an artists' community located on a 400 acre estate in Saratoga Springs, New York. Its mission is "to nurture the creative process by providing an opportunity for artists to work without interruption in a supportive environment."...

 and the New York Foundation for the Arts. She collaborates regularly with composer and bassist John Lindberg, and they have performed and taught workshops at venues in North America and Europe. Bowman is Director of the Creative Writing Program at Indiana University

Indiana University

Indiana University is a multi-campus public university system in the state of Indiana, United States. Indiana University has a combined student body of more than 100,000 students, including approximately 42,000 students enrolled at the Indiana University Bloomington campus and approximately 37,000...

, and also teaches at the Fine Arts Work Center

Fine Arts Work Center

The Fine Arts Work Center is a non-profit enterprise devoted to encouraging the growth and development of emerging visual artists and writers through residency programs, to the propagation of aesthetic values and experience, and to the restoration of the year-round vitality of the historic art...

 in Provincetown. She lives in Bloomington, Indiana

Bloomington, Indiana

Bloomington is a city in and the county seat of Monroe County in the southern region of the U.S. state of Indiana. The population was 80,405 at the 2010 census....

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Honors

• 1994 Kate Tufts Discovery Award
• Peregrine Smith Poetry Prize
• Dobie Paisano Fellowship from the University of Texas
• New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry

Published works

Full-length poetry collections

• The Plath Cabinet (Four Way Books, 2009)

Anthologies edited

Reviews

"'I want words meat-hooked from the living steer,' Lowell wrote, as if foreseeing 1-800-hot-ribs, the debut collection by Catherine Bowman, a skilled young poet who seems to manipulate the language with a branding iron in one hand and a bullwhip in the other. Bowman’s native soil is Texas, and though she casts a cold eye on its codes of Bubba Machismo and Cheerleader Femininity, she knows that denying one’s roots is equivalent to using a butcher’s cleaver to perform an act of self-amputation. She also knows how thin the line between Bubba and the Cheerleader really is."

"Catherine Bowman’s Notarikon fills its reader with a profound sense of the obscure, of the million tiny, sticky acts of irreverence that constitute an individual’s window to the world. She quilts together all the minutiae that make a neighbor, a marriage, or a vacation, to name a few. Her own ability to systematize images and information fascinates her, and the book’s title reflects this fascination appropriately: “Notarikon” is a Kabbalist term for making new words out of the first and last letters of other words in holy texts."

Further reading

• Art at Our Doorstep: San Antonio Writers and Artists featuring Catherine Bowman. Edited by Nan Cuba and Riley Robinson (Trinity University Press, 2008).

Ploughshares

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