Photograph © John T. Davis
Kathleen McCracken is a Canadian poet from Dundalk, Ontario. She is the author of eight collections of poetry including Blue Light, Bay and College (Penumbra Press, 1991), which was shortlisted for the Governor General's Award for Poetry in 1992, A Geography of Souls (Thistledown Press, 2002), Mooncalves (Exile Editions, 2007) and Tattoo Land (Exile Editions, 2009). Most recently, a bilingual English/Portuguese edition of her poetry entitled Double Self Portrait with Mirror: New and Selected Poems (2014), and featuring a preface by Irish poet Medbh McGuckian, was published by the Brazilian press Editora Ex Machina. She is the recipient of the University of Toronto Review’s Editor's Choice Award for Poetry, the Anne Szumigalski Editor's Prize, the Glebe House Harmony Community Trust Poetry Award and the 2017 Poetry Ireland/Tyrone Guthrie Residency Bursary. She was a finalist for the WB Yeats Society of New York Poetry Competition, the Montreal International Prize for Poetry, the Walrus Poetry Prize, the 2018 Grist Pro Forma Poetry Prize and the 2020 CBC Poetry Prize. In 2019 she won the Seamus Heaney Award for New Writing. She has held several Ontario Arts Council awards and an Individual Artist Award from the Northern Ireland Arts Council. Her poems have appeared in The Malahat Review, Poetry Canada Review, Exile Quarterly, Poetry Ireland, The Shop, Revival, Abridged, New Orleans Review, Grain, Cyphers and Southword and she has given readings in Canada, Ireland, Portugal, Brazil, the United Kingdom and the United States. Kathleen is currently Lecturer in Creative Writing and Contemporary Literature at Ulster University in Northern Ireland.
