Faye Kicknosway

Poet and visual artist Faye Kicknosway was born in Detroit and raised in Los Angeles. She earned a BA at Wayne State University and an MA at San Francisco State College.
 
Kicknosway is the author of more than a dozen poetry collections, including Mixed Plate: New and Selected Poems (2003), Who Shall Know Them? (1985), and All These Voices: New and Selected Poems (1986). Her work is also featured in the feminist poetry anthology No More Masks! (1973).
 
Threading together psychological narrative with mythic violence, Kicknosway’s poems reveal a filmic attention to the transformative possibilities of light and shadow. In a review of All These Voices, poet Jason Schneiderman observes, “Kicknosway challenges the dominance and trustworthiness of narrative in her poems of fragmentation, offering up constant revisions of where the gaze should fall.” Who Shall Know Them?, her book of poems engaging Walker Evans’s photographs, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.
 
Kicknosway’s other honors include a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and a PEN Syndicated Fiction Award. She lives in Honolulu, where she has taught at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa under the name Morgan Blair.