Introducing 2013 AWW Afternoon Poetry Seminar Instructor -- Cathryn Essinger

Cathryn Essinger

Afternoon Poetry Seminar Instructor Cathryn Essinger is the author of three books of poetry--A Desk In The Elephant House, which won the Walt McDonald First Book Award from Texas Tech University Press, and My Dog Does Not Read Plato, which was the runner up in the Main Street Rag book competition in 2004. Her third book, What I Know About Innocence, was published in 2009, also from Main Street Rag press, and includes a video poem produced by her son, David, a fiction writer and professor at the University of Findlay. 

Essinger’s poems have been anthologized in The Poetry Anthology: 1912-2002, Poetry Daily: 366 Poems, and in O Taste and See: Food Poems. Her work has been featured on Garrison Keillor’s Writer’s Almanac. 

Cathryn Essinger's new work has appeared in such places as The Southern Review, New England Review, and Quarterly West. She received an Ohio Arts Council grant and was Ohio’s Poet of the Year in 2005. She is a member of The Greenville Poets, a small but well-published poetry group that does workshop presentations and supports the work of younger writers. She is a retired Professor of English from Edison Community College, in Piqua, Ohio.