K Prevallet

K (Kristin) Prevallet is known for poems and poetic projects that synthesize formal experiments, lyric musicality, archival recovery, embedded meditations, and trance poetics. Prevallet is the author of six books of poetry, including Everywhere Here and in Brooklyn (A Four Quartets) (Belladonna*, 2012), Shadow Evidence Intelligence (Factory School, 2006), and her critically acclaimed collection I, Afterlife: Essay in Mourning Time (Essay Press, 2007). She has edited or coedited several volumes, including A Helen Adam Reader (National Poetry Foundation, 2008) on the poet Helen Adam, the literary journal apex of the M, a special issue on Trance Poetics for The Drunken Boat, and, with Tonya Foster, Third Mind: Creative Writing Through Visual Art (Teachers & Writers Collaborative, 2002). Prevallet is also the author of the craft and theory text Trance Poetics (Wide Reality Books, 2013).

Prevallet’s essays, interviews, and poems appear in a variety of publications, including the Chicago Review, The New Republic, The American Poetry Review, the Boston Review, the Brooklyn Rail, and Guernica.

Informed by ecosomatic linguistics, formalism, confessionalism, and documentary poetics, Prevallet’s work is collaborative and boundless. Her poetry, performance, essays, and scholarship bring together her multiple and varied influences while remaining grounded in her affirmation:

For me, poetry is an emerging grammar that keeps thought, and its corresponding biochemistry, moving. The poem shows this: it presents thinking as being arising in a body. It is through this deep understanding—that to move thought is not just a matter of playing with language and calling myself a poet; to move thought is to heal and to survive. (Quoted in Other Influences: Essays on Feminist Avant-garde Poetic Lineages, edited by Jennifer Firestone and Marcella Durand, MIT Press, 2023.) 

In 2010, Prevallet began to work as a practitioner of the healing language art of hypnotherapy and synthesized her poetic craft into what she calls “Trance Poetics.”

Born in 1966 in Denver, Colorado, Prevallet earned degrees at the University of Colorado, Boulder and the University of Buffalo. In 2022, she was awarded a PhD by publication from the University of Glouchestershire, UK. She is an associate for the Institute for Writing and Thinking at Bard College and a lecturer in creative and critical writing at Eugene Lang College / The New School. Prevallet lives in upstate New York.