Kathryn Savage is a hybrid writer whose debut lyric essay collection GROUNDGLASS is forthcoming from Coffee House Press. Her writing has appeared in American Short Fiction, the Guardian, Poets & Writers, the Academy of American Poets, the Village Voice, and the Best Small Fictions of 2015, among others.
Recipient of the 2018 Academy of American Poets James Wright Prize, she’s been awarded grants, fellowships, and residencies from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Napa Valley Writers’ Conference, Minnesota State Arts Board, Millay Colony, Ucross Foundation, and Vermont Studio Center. In 2018, she was awarded the O’Rourke Travel Fellowship and the Graduate Research Partnership Program Fellowship from the University of Minnesota to research and write about volcanoes in Iceland. Savage teaches creative writing and composition at MCAD and at the University of Minnesota, where she is pursuing a second MFA in poetry.
Prior to her Tulsa Artist Fellowship, she served as a program manager at the Loft Literary Center, overseeing the Loft Mentor Series fellowship in poetry and creative prose, a program which offers twelve emerging Minnesota writers the opportunity to work intensively with six nationally acclaimed writers for one fellowship year. During her six-year tenure at the Loft, she managed a range of literary arts programs funded by the Poetry Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Jerome Foundation.
In the editorial space, Savage has served as an editor at the University of Minnesota Law School Institute on Crime and Public Policy and has read scripts for Focus Features and Cine Mosaic Films in New York City, as well as manuscripts for Sarabande Books. From 2014 to 2019, she volunteered with the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop, overseeing the organization’s annual broadside collaboration in partnership with the Minnesota Center for Book Arts. Savage has studied creative writing at the New School, holds an MFA in fiction from Bennington College, and is at work on a collection of short stories and a novel.
