Kathleen Ossip

This information is accurate as of the fellowship year indicated for each fellow.

Kathleen Ossip, who teaches at the New School, is interested in writing poems that are grounded in real life and open to the complexities and craziness of the contemporary world. Her books explore how vast poetry is, and how many different approaches it can contain.

During her fellowship, she is writing poems for her fourth book, which she expects will foreground happiness, indispensable and eternal counter-element to the world’s pain, and with that, also explore areas of experience like simplicity, sex and love, surprise, pleasure, and faith.

She is the author of The Do-Over: Poems (Sarabande Books, 2015), a New York Times Editors’ Choice; The Cold War (Sarabande Books, 2011), one of Publishers Weekly's Best Books of 2011; and The Search Engine (American Poetry Review, 2002), chosen by Derek Walcott for the American Poetry Review/Honickman First Book Prize. Ossip, who earned her MFA in creative writing from the New School, has also received a fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts.