Kathy Fagan is the author of Bad Hobby, winner of the 2023 William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America, and Sycamore, a finalist for the Kingsley Tufts Award. She published four previous collections, including the National Poetry Series winner, The Raft, and Vassar Miller Prize-winner MOVING & ST RAGE. Her seventh collection, The Unbecoming, will be published by W.W. Norton in September 2026. Fagan is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, an Ingram Merrill Foundation Fellowship, and various residencies including The Frost Place residency. Fagan is Professor Emerita of English at The Ohio State University, where she cofounded the MFA Program in Creative Writing and edited The Journal and the Wheeler Poetry Prize book series for OSU Press.
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Books by Kathy Fagan
A 2023 Guggenheim Fellow
A Ohiana Award Finalist in Poetry
A Williams Carlos Williams Award Recipient
From Kingsley Tufts Award finalist Kathy Fagan comes Bad Hobby, a perceptive collection focused on memory, class, and might-have-beens.
The language of trees is the language of love and loss: in this collection, black walnuts fall where no one can eat or smell them, and cottonwood sends out feverish signals of pollen. And like the bark of the sycamore, which sheds to allow the tree’s expansion, these poems document both pain and tenuous rebirth.