UW Author Kate Northrop Receives Award Recognizing Excellence by Young Writers

University of Wyoming Associate Professor Kate Northrop has been awarded the $25,000 Jeannette Haien Ballard Writer's Prize, an annual award given to a young writer of proven excellence in poetry or prose.

The award honors young, talented writers and bolsters their careers by encouraging the production of quality literary works.

Northrop, an associate professor in the UW Department of English, is the author of three collections of poetry: “Clean” (2011); “Things are Disappearing Here” (2007), which was a New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice and a finalist for the Academy of American Poets’ James Laughlin Award; and “Back Through Interruption” (2002), which won Kent State University Press’s Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prize.

A UW faculty member since 2006, Northrop teaches workshops in poetry writing and is popular among students as a mentor to Master of Fine Arts students working to complete their thesis projects.

“I’m grateful for Kate -- her poetry is what brought me to Wyoming,” says Callie Plaxco, a second-year UW poet who works with Northrop. “After reading ‘Things are Disappearing Here,’ I decided to follow Kate and work with her. Now, I'm not only grateful for her poetry, but for her mentorship, for the way she reads my work and asks questions of it, and then cheers me onward. No one I know deserves a prize like this more than Kate.”

Northrop’s poems have appeared in AGNI literary magazine, The American Poetry Review, The Massachusetts Review, Raritan and other journals. She has received several fellowships from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, the Walter E. Dakin fellowship from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, the Paumanok Poetry Award and an American Academy of Poets Prize.

For more information about Northrop or the Jeannette Haien Ballard Writer's Prize, contact the MFA Creative Writing Program at (307) 766-6453 or visit the program’s website at www.uwyo.edu/creativewriting/.