Kathleen Driskell: Kentucky Poet Laureate 2025-2026
“I believe when we engage our creativity, we’re being given access to the sacred, the divine. When we activate our imaginations, we are activating our capacity to love ourselves and to love one another. We create a world that demonstrates our shared humanity is strengthened through, paradoxically, writing about the differences among us.”
– Kathleen Driskell –
Kathleen Driskell
Kentucky Poet Laureate 2025-2026
Award-winning poet, essayist, and teacher Kathleen Driskell has authored of six poetry collections, most recently Goat-Footed Gods (Carnegie Mellon UP). Other collections include Blue Etiquette: Poems, a finalist for the Weatherford Award; Next Door to the Dead, winner of the Judy Gaines Young Book Award; and Seed Across Snow, a Poetry Foundation national bestseller. Her individual poems and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, Rattle, River Teeth, Appalachian Review, The Southern Review, Shenandoah and other magazines; and her work has been featured in Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, and American Life in Poetry.
From 2019-22, Kathleen served as chair of the board of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs, the professional organization of creative writers and creative writing programs with around 75,000 members. She is professor of creative writing and Chair of the Naslund-Mann Graduate School of Writing at Spalding University in Louisville, where she lives with her husband in an old country church built before the American Civil War.
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