Kathleen Balma

Poet

New Orleans, LA

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Author's Bio

Ms Balma is a librarian at New Orleans Public Library. She has lived in several regions of the United States, Australia, and Spain. A grateful New Orleans transplant, she is the woman Mary Hatch might have been, if only Mary Hatch hadn't married George Bailey.

Writers Retreats:

Sewanee Writers’ Conference

Publications & Prizes

Anthologies:

Atlanta Review 25th Anniversary Anthology (Atlanta Review, 2019)

Maple Leaf Rag 40th Anniversary Anthology (Portals Press, 2019)

Maple Leaf Rag VI: An Anthology of Poetic Writings from New Orleans (Portals Press, 2017)

Montreal International Prize: Global Poetry Anthology (Vehicule Press, 2015)

Pushcart Prize XXXVII (Pushcart Press, 2013)

Chapbook:

Gallimaufry & Farrago (Finishing Line Press, 2018)

Journals:

2River View

American Journal of Poetry

Atlanta Review

Cardinal Points

Contemporary Verse 2

Crab Orchard Review

Drunken Boat

Good Foot

Hotel Amerika

New Haven Review

PMS: poemmemoirstory

Prelude

Prick of the Spindle

Puerto del Sol

Spillway

The Hopkins Review

Xavier Review

Prizes won:

William Alexander II & Lisa Percy Fellowship, Rivendell Writers' Colony (2017); Tennessee Williams Scholarship, Sewanee Writers Conference (2016); Pushcart Prize XXXVII (2013); International Publication Award (Atlanta Review, 2010); Fulbright US Student Grant (Spain, 2007-2008); Roy Battenhouse Memorial Award, National Society of Arts and Letters (Bloomington, Indiana chapter, 2004); Editor's Choice, James Wright Poetry Contest (Mid-American Review, 2003).

Personal Favorites

Favorite authors:

Richard Adams, Maya Angelou, Aristophanes, John Ashbery, Margaret Atwood, Jean M. Auel, Jane Austen, Julian Barnes, James Baldwin, J.M. Barrie, John Berryman, Marion Zimmer Bradley, Ananda Braxton-Smith, Russell Edson, George Eliot, Elizabeth Bishop, James M. Cain, Albert Camus, Eric Carle, Raymond Carver, Kate Chopin, Lucille Clifton, Miguel de Cervantes, J.M. Coetzee, Wilkie Collins, Roald Dahl, Guy de Maupassant, Daniel Defoe, Nathalie Diaz, Charles Dickens, Emily Dickinson, James Dickey, Joan Didion, Stephen Dobyns, John Donne, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Alexandre Dumas, Stephen Dunn, Russell Edson, Euripides, Elena Ferrante, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gustave Flaubert, Adam Foulds, Anne Frank, Nick Flynn, Barry Gifford, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Louise Glück, Albert Goldbarth, William Golding, William Goldman, Lev Grossman, Xiaolu Guo, Mark Haddon, Charles Boardman Hawes, Lorraine Hansberry, Terrance Hayes, Lillian Hellman, M.H. Herlong, Hesiod, Tony Hoagland, Alice Hoffman, Miroslav Holub, Homer, Marie Howe, Bohumil Hrabal, Andrew Hudgins, Richard Hughes, Vicente Huidobro, Zora Neale Hurston, Shirley Jackson, Henry James, Denis Johnson, Rodney Jones, Cynthia Kadohata, Franz Kafka, Brigit Pageen Kelley, Maxine Hong Kingston, Galway Kinnell, Rudyard Kipling, David Kirby, Etheridge Knight, John Knowles, Yusef Komunyakaa, Munro Leaf, Stanisław Lem, Madeleine L'Engle, Tracy Letts, Primo Levi, C.S. Lewis, Jack London, A. Loudermilk, Lucretius, Herman Melville, A.A. Milne, John Milton, Molière, Les Murray, Vladimir Nabokov, Maggie Nelson, Pablo Neruda, E. Nesbit, Tim O'Brien, Flannery O'Connor, Frank O'Hara, Sharon Olds, George Orwell, Kenneth Patchen, Ann Patchett, Nicanor Parra, Lucia Perillo, Carl Phillips, Luigi Pirandello, Beatrix Potter, Marcel Proust, Arthur Ransome, Anne Rice, Rainer Maria Rilke, Iris Murdoch, Theodore Roethke, J.K. Rowling, Rumi, Cynthia Rylant, J.D. Salinger, Mary Jo Salter, George Saunders, Sir Walter Scott, David Sedaris, Frederick Seidel, Maurice Sendak, Marjane Satrapi, William Shakespeare, Brenda Shaughnessy, Mary Shelley, Leslie Marmon Silko, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Robert Louis Stevenson, Dr. Seuss, Gail Sheehy, Muriel Spark, Wisława Szymborska, Shaun Tan, James Tate, Mildred D. Taylor, Amor Towles, Lao Tsu, Marina Tsvetaeva, Mark Twain, César Vallejo, Jules Verne, Voltaire, Kurt Vonnegut, Alice Walker, Sarah Waters, E.B. White, T.H. White, Mo Willems, Tennessee Williams, William Carlos Williams, Tobias Wolff, Virginia Woolf, William Wordsworth, Mark Wunderlich

More Information

Gives readings:

Yes

Travels for readings:

Yes

Identifies as:

LGBTQ

Fluent in:

English, Spanish

Born in:

Evansville

Raised in:

Harrisburg, IL

Illinois

Please note: All information in the Directory is provided by the listed writers or their representatives.

Last update: Oct 11, 2019