Poet Kate Northrop to read at UPB

Award-winning poet Kate Northrop will read from her works on Tuesday, March 2, at the University of Pittsburgh at Bradford.

Northrop will appear at noon in Pitt-Bradford’s Mukaiyama University Room in the Frame-Westerberg Commons. A reception will follow. This event, which is part of the university’s Spectrum Series, is free and open to the public.

Northrop’s first book, “Back Through Interruption,” was chosen by Lynn Emanuel for the 2001 Tom and Stan Wick Poetry Prize, and was published in 2002 by Kent State University Press. Her second book, “Things are Disappearing Here,” was Editor’s Choice in the New York Times Book Review and a finalist for the James Laughlin Award. It was published in 2007 by Persea Books.

Eric McHenry, poetry critic for the New York Times Book Review, said, “Northrop’s poems recall early photographs where the shutter was left open until the scene had burned itself onto the paper. Her images acquire definition word by carefully weighed word.”

Northrop’s poems have been published in American Poetry Review, Northwest Review, Quarterly West, Black Warrior Review, Rattle and Louisiana Literature.

Dr. Nancy McCabe, Pitt-Bradford associate professor of writing, said, “Northrop’s poems present simple images like an old rose-printed skirt on a scarecrow or night in a museum garden in which statues remain ‘suspended like this/in their continuing predicaments’ to hauntingly evoke what remains palpable and animate between lines and amidst silences, absences, gaps, still lives the apparently inanimate.”

Northrop has received many honors, including the Pennsylvania Council of the Arts Individual Fellowship and the 1995 Academy of American Poets Prize, University of Iowa. She is a contributing editor at The American Poetry Review and an assistant professor of English/Creative Writing at West Chester University in Pennsylvania.