Kathryn Kirkpatrick

Kirkpatrick has explored feminist and ecofeminist themes within her works, as well as societal perceptions of womanhood as women age. Kirkpatrick is a breast cancer survivor and writes about her experience in her 2011 poetry collection, Unaccountable Weather.

She was awarded the N.C. Poetry Society's Brockman-Campbell Award for her poetry collections, The Body's Horizon (1997), Our Held Animal Breath (2013), and Her Small Hands Were Not Beautiful (2015). The North Carolina Literary and Historical Association awarded her with the Roanoke-Chowan Poetry Prize for her poetry collections, Beyond Reason (2004) and The Fisher Queen (2019). Her book, Out of the Garden (2007), was a finalist for the Southern Independent Booksellers Association poetry award.

Her works include seven poetry collections: The Body's Horizon (1996), Beyond Reason (2004), Out of the Garden (2007), Unaccountable Weather (2011), Our Held Animal Breath (2012), Her Small Hands Were Not Beautiful (2014), and The Fisher Queen: New & Selected Poems (2019). She has also written two chapbooks entitled Looking for Ceilidh and The Master's Wife. Kirkpatrick places great emphasis on the ethical treatment of animals and explores the ways in which these issues overlap with human societal and cultural conflict.

Kathryn Kirkpatrick (born Columbia, South Carolina in 1957) is a poet, scholar, and English professor at Appalachian State University. Her works of poetry focus on the natural world and the ways humans interact with nature, and the ethical treatment of animals. As an academic, she also specializes in Irish literature and culture, which is a common theme in her published works. She has received several awards for her poetry collections.