KATHY FAGAN
Kathy Fagan’s seventh collection, The Unbecoming, is forthcoming from W.W. Norton in Autumn 2026. Her 2022 collection, winner of PSA’s William Carlos Williams Poetry Prize, is Bad Hobby (Milkweed), available in print and audio. Sycamore (Milkweed, 2017) was a finalist for the 2018 Kingsley Tufts Award. A 2023 Guggenheim Fellow, she is Professor Emerita of The Ohio State University, where she co-founded and directed the MFA Program in Creative Writing and co-edited The Journal/OSU PressWheeler Poetry Prize Series.
We protect what we value. Leonardo drafted the ideal
proportions of the human body: navel at the center of a circle,
genitals at the center of a square. Vitruvian Man is rarely
displayed as any extended exposure to light will destroy it.
And when one deeply attends to the world, as poets must, the abundance of detail, both painful and magnificent, is overwhelming. I haven’t thought about it thoroughly enough perhaps, but it’s possible that I err on the side of non-intervention in my poems as I grow older.
October 26, 2025
