KC Trommer

Poet and essayist KC Trommer is the author of the award-winning poetry collection We Call Them Beautiful (Diode Editions, 2019) and the chapbook The Hasp Tongue (dancing girl press, 2014). She is the founder of the online audio project QUEENSBOUND. She is 2021 poet in residence at Works on Water on Governors Island and was a 2021 Lower Manhattan Cultural Council artist-in-residence on Governors Island through LMCC’s COVID-19 Response Residency Program. With Spencer Reece, she co-curates the Red Door Series at St. Mark’s Church in Jackson Heights.

A graduate of the MFA program at The University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, KC has been the recipient of an Academy of American Poets Prize and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Kevin Prufer selected her poem “Fear Not, Mary” as the winner of the 2015 Fugue Poetry Prize.

Her poems have appeared in AGNI, The Antioch Review, Blackbird, The Common, Diode, LitHub, The Sycamore Review, Poetry Daily, Prairie Schooner, Poetry East, Radio Lab, as well as in the anthologies Resist Much, Obey Little; All We Can Hold; Bared; and Who Will Speak for America? Her essays have appeared in VIDA Review, LitHub, and in the anthology Oh, Baby! True Stories About Conception, Adoption, Surrogacy, Pregnancy, Labor, and Love (Creative Nonfiction, 2015).

She has been awarded grants and fellowships from the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, the Queens Council on the Arts, Works on Water, the Table 4 Writers Foundation, the Center for Book Arts, the Vermont Studio Center, the Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, and the Prague Summer Program.

In 2017, the Grammy Award-winning composer Herschel Garfein created the song cycle “Three Rides” for soprano, cello, and piano from her work. The first of the songs, “The Cyclone,” had its world premiere in New York as a part of the 2017 Five Boroughs Music Festival’s Five Borough Song Book, Volume II.

She has taught writing at Poets House, Catapult, the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor; Bard High School Early College, Queens; and the University of Pennsylvania.

KC studied collage and painting at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, School for Visual Arts, and Parsons. Her collage work has been featured in group and solo shows in Ann Arbor and New York City. She is the Assistant Director of Communications at NYU Gallatin and lives in Jackson Heights, Queens, with her son.

KC read at Pen Parentis on January 14th, 2014. Follow this link to see all the books featured in Season 11. Learn more about the author at her website.