Katherine Larson is an American poet, molecular biologist and field ecologist.[1][2] She is the 2010 winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets Competition and her first collection of poetry, Radial Symmetry, was published by Yale University Press in 2011.[3]
Larson's father worked as a professor of forestry and environmental science; her mother was a fourth-grade teacher with a passion for science.[1][4] She graduated from Flagstaff High School, Flagstaff, Arizona, in 1996,[5] and went on to the University of Arizona, where she took a Bachelor of Science degree in ecology and evolutionary biology, and a Bachelor of Arts degree in creative writing and English.[4] She also holds a Master of Fine Arts degree in creative writing from the University of Virginia,[4][6] where she was a Henry Hoyns fellow in creative writing.[7]
Larson's work has appeared in anthologies such as Prentice Hall’s Literature: An Introduction to Reading and Writing, as well as in the journals AGNI, Poetry, Boulevard, The Kenyon Review, The Massachusetts Review, Notre Dame Review, and Poetry Northwest.[3][8][9] She has cited Marianne Moore, Elizabeth Bishop, Pablo Neruda and Tomas Tranströmer among her formative influences, as well as Medbh McGuckian, Ciaran Carson and Seamus Heaney from a semester spent studying in Ireland when she was in college.[4] In 2003, Larson won a Ruth Lilly Poetry Fellowship and she is a recipient of The Union League Civic and Arts Foundation Poetry Prize.[3]
In 2009 Larson collaborated with artist Heather Green on The Ghost Net Project at the University of Arizona's Poetry Center. 25 shadow boxes, each paired with a poem by Larson, were constructed from salvaged shrimp-boat wood and filled with flotsam and jetsam as a way of examining cultural and ecological relationships in the Gulf of California, where Larson had lived and worked for six months.[4][10][11][12]
Her first collection of poetry, Radial Symmetry, was published by Yale University Press in 2011.[2][13][14] The book was praised in The Independent for "an extraordinary wakefulness, an immersion in nuance that enriches experience",[14] while The Paris Review said: "The natural world has never felt more physical, more alive with tiny movements and infinite textures".[15] Bookforum enjoyed its "measured sensuousness".[16]
In 2012, Radial Symmetry won the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, the $10,000 award given annually to poets of promise by Claremont Graduate University.[6][17] The collection was also awarded the Levis Reading Prize from Virginia Commonwealth University and the ForeWord Magazine Gold Medal Prize in the Poetry Category.[13]