Katie Hartsock

Associate Professor of English
531 O'Dowd Hall
(248) 370-4186
[email protected]

Hartsock’s first full-length poetry collection, Bed of Impatiens, was a finalist for the 2015 Able Muse Book Award, and was published in 2016. Her second collection, Wolf Trees (2023), weaves changing ecologies with personal worlds of motherhood and living with Type 1 diabetes. At Oakland, Hartsock teaches poetry and creative writing workshops, and literature courses including Classical Mythology, What Is Lyric Poetry?, and Disability Studies and Literature. She encourages young writers to read with energy and curiosity, to work in a variety of forms, and to write from the cities and landscapes of southeast Michigan, from trips to the DIA to walks through OU’s own Bio-preserve. Her classical mythology students have a final project option to retell a myth through writing or art.

Her poetry appears widely, in journals such as Arion, Beloit Poetry Journal, Birmingham Poetry Review, Dappled Things, Iron Horse Literary Review, Kenyon Review, Massachusetts Review,  Michigan Quarterly Review, The New Criterion, Oxford Poetry, Pleiades, Poetry, RHINO, The Threepenny Review, and THRUSH. Her work has also appeared in The Wallace Stevens Journal; and in the anthology Down to the Dark River: Poems about the Mississippi River (Louisiana Literature Press, 2015). Her current manuscripts-in-progress include The Last Crusade, a poetry collection (containing, yes, a few Indiana Jones poems), and Songs of the Iliad, a hybrid text combining translation with vignettes of the epic’s ancient audiences and creative commentary.  Selections of her translations of Homer appeared in University of Iowa’s Exchanges: Journal of Literary Translation.

She holds a PhD in Comparative Literary Studies from Northwestern University. Her dissertation was entitled, “The Past Like Never Before: Classical Women in Revisionary Poetry from Euripides and Ovid to H.D., Rita Dove, and Carol Ann Duffy.”  She received a MFA from the University of Michigan, where she received the major Hopwood graduate award in poetry, and a BA in English Literature with a minor in Classics from the University of Cincinnati. She served as the editor of #WordsForResilience, a community literary project addressing the Covid-19 pandemic from Oakland University’s Center for Public Humanities.

Education
Ph.D. in Comparative Literature, Northwestern University
MFA (poetry), University of Michigan
BA in English Literature (minor in Classics), University of Cincinnati

Areas of study
Creative writing; contemporary American poetry; classical receptions studies; Ancient Greek and Latin epic, tragic, and lyric poetry; revisionary poetry; translation studies; Modernism; feminist critical thought and poetics

Publications
Hartsock’s first full-length poetry collection, Bed of Impatiens, was a finalist for the 2015 Able Muse Book Award, and was published in 2016. She is the author of two poetry chapbooks:  Hotels, Motels, and Extended Stays, published by Toadlily Press in their 2014 Quartet Series, and  Veritas Caput (Passim Editions, 2015). Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in a variety of journals, including  Arion, Beloit Poetry Journal, Birmingham Poetry Review, Crab Orchard Review, DIAGRAM, Hanging Loose, H_NGM_N, Fifth Wednesday, Iron Horse Literary Review, Massachusetts Review, Measure, Michigan Quarterly Review, Midwestern Gothic, Passages North, RHINO, Southern Indiana Review,  Southwest Review,  and The Wallace Stevens Journal; and in the anthology  Down to the Dark River: Poems about the Mississippi River (Louisiana Literature Press, 2015).

Interviews
RHINO poetry magazine, 2016
Midwestern Gothic journal, 2016

More information can be found at katiehartsock.com.