Laura Kasischke
Ohio University’s Spring Literary Festival is April 3 to 5. One of this year’s featured authors is poet and novelist Laura Kasischke, who was born in Grand Rapids, Mich., and teaches in the MFA program at the University of Michigan.
Her books of poetry include Wild Brides (1992), Fire and Flower (1998), Dance and Disappear (2002), Gardening in the Dark (2004), Lilies Without (2007), Space, in Chains (2011), which won the National Book Critics Circle Award, and Where Now (2017).
Kasischke has won numerous awards for her poetry, including the Juniper Prize, the Beatrice Hawley Award, the Alice Fay DiCastagnola Award, the Bobst Award for Emerging Writers, and the Rilke Poetry Prize from the University of North Texas. She has also won several Pushcart Prizes, as well as received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation.
Kasischke’s narrative expertise helps account for her dual career as a novelist. Her novels include Suspicious River (1996), White Bird in a Blizzard (1999), The Life Before her Eyes (2002), which was made into a movie starring Uma Thurman, In a Perfect World (2009), and The Raising (2011). Taking on such weighty subjects as global pandemics and school shootings, Kasischke’s novels have nonetheless enjoyed broad popular appeal.
In the New York Times, Erika Krouse noted the poetic qualities of Kasischke’s fiction: “It is not enough to say that Kasischke’s language is ‘poetic,’ a word that has come to mean ‘pretty.’ Rather, her writing does what good poetry does—it shows us an alternate world and lulls us into living in it.”
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