Kathryn Starbuck

Journalist, essayist, and newspaper editor, Kathryn Starbuck started writing poems in her 60s. She is the author of Griefmania (Sheep Meadow Press, 2006) and Sex Perhaps (Sheep Meadow Press, 2014). Her poems have appeared in the New Yorker, Poetry, Sewanee Review, and Best American Poetry 2008.

Though she was a practiced prose writer, it was the experience of grief that led her to writing poetry. After the deaths of her husband, the poet George Starbuck, her parents, and others close to her, she found that her “scribbling” in notebooks was taking the form of poetry. Starbuck identifies her subjects in Griefmania as Greek history and “my interior life.” Joel Brouwer has commented on the “real rawness to the emotion and the energy” in Starbuck’s work.

Starbuck is the editor, with Elizabeth Meese, of George Starbuck’s poetry collections Visible Ink (2002) and The Works: Poems Selected from Five Decades (2003). She has edited the Milford, New Hampshire, weekly newspaper Cabinet. She has traveled widely and lives in Tuscaloosa, Alabama.