“belle mar”:
The poetry of Katie Bickham
August 6 - september 6, 2014
coolspace @ artspace
Winner, Literary Best of show 2014 critical mass Exhibition 2 chosen by critic David Ulin. Katie Bickham was born and raised in the Deep South and finds much of her writing turning itself toward her home state of Louisiana. After receiving her BA in English and MA in Liberal Arts from Louisiana State University in Shreveport, Katie took Steinbeck’s maxim (“You can never really write about a place until you leave it”) to heart when she left Shreveport for the University of Southern Maine. Katie believes, “Poetry can trim the busy-ness of our lives and leave us with the good solid thruths that, in reading, we discover have been hiding inside us eternally.” Her poems have appeared in Deep South Magazine and The Road Not Taken: A Journal of Formal Poetry.
EXHIBITING ARTIST:
Katie Bickham
ARTIST BIO
Katie is the recipient of The New Millenium Poetry Prize, The Lena-Miles Wever Todd Prize from Pleaides Press, The Missouri Review Editor's Prize, an NEA state fellowship, and an SLS fellowship. Her poems have appeared in New Millenium, Rattle, Frontier, Radar, The New Guard, Southern Quarterly, Prairie Schooner, VerseDaily, Pleiades, The Missouri Review, Deep South Magazine, and elsewhere.
Alicia Ostriker describes Katie's poems as "quietly urgent." Mostly documentary in style and spare in tone and imagery, the poems center story and character most often.
Katie teaches creative writing at Bossier Parish Community College in Bossier City, Louisiana. She lives in Shreveport with her husband, son, and their oddly-shaped shelter dogs in a very old house, and despite having an office, writes most of her poetry in bed.
More of her work can be found at http://www.katiebickham.net
