don’t look away:
The poetry of Katie Bickham
August 30 - October 13, 2019
mezzanine @ artspace
Katie Bickham brings five never-before seen poems to the mezzanine @ artspace, brought to life further by the visual interpretations of five Northwest Louisiana female artists. . Katie was selected by Critic Ann Fisher-Wirth as the Critic’s Choice in the Literary category.
STATEMENT FROM THE ARTIST
The poems in Don't Look Away are asking readers to do some hard work in our modern world. We have become experts at distracting ourselves from the ugliness swimming beneath the surface of our everyday lives. Dealing with mental illness, sexual violence, and a war-torn world, these poems strip away the layers of insulation we've built between ourselves and the difficulties lurking in our society. Illustrated by five female artists, these poems have been turned into visual broadsides to further immerse the audience in the literary and visual world of the work.
EXHIBITING ARTIST:
Katie Bickham
Featuring the visual artwork of Northwest Louisiana Artists Jazmin Jernigan, Kelly McDade, Lilly Thompson, Susan Abney and Paige Powell.
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
