Katherine Larson

Katherine Larson is an American poet, molecular biologist and field ecologist. 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.

Early life and education

Larson's father worked as a professor of forestry and environmental science; her mother was a fourth-grade teacher with a passion for science. She graduated from Flagstaff High School, Flagstaff, Arizona, in 1996, 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. where she was a Henry Hoyns fellow in creative writing.

Career 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. 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.

Her first collection of poetry, Radial Symmetry, was published by Yale University Press in 2011. The book was praised in The Independent for "an extraordinary wakefulness, an immersion in nuance that enriches experience", Bookforum enjoyed its "measured sensuousness".

In 2012, Radial Symmetry won the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, the $10,000 award given annually to poets of promise by Claremont Graduate University. The collection was also awarded the Levis Reading Prize from Virginia Commonwealth University and the ForeWord Magazine Gold Medal Prize in the Poetry Category.

She lives in Tucson, Arizona with her husband and daughter.

Awards and honours In 2010, Larson was selected by Louise Glück as winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets Competition.

Works Radial symmetry, New Haven : Yale University Press, 2011. ,