Famous

She “became famous, finally, to herself,” Kathleen Flenniken writes. This is the kind of fame at the heart of most lives and at the center of Flenniken's first collection, the winner of the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry. Here “a little voice sings / from the back of the auditorium / of my throat. Aren't all of us / waiting to be discovered?”

The poet's answer is sometimes grave, sometimes comic, but always tuned to the incidental music of daily life.

Kathleen Flenniken’s poems have appeared in Poetry, Iowa Review, Mid-American Review, Southern Review, and Prairie Schooner. She was named Washington State Poet Laureate in 2012. Coeditor and president of Floating Bridge Press, a publisher of Washington State poets, Flenniken has taught poetry through Writers in the Schools and other arts agencies. Visit Kathleen Flenniken's website for more information.