Office: Keezell 409

Spring 2024 Office Hours: By Zoom or appointment in-person from 12:30-1:30pm

Education:
MFA, University of Massachusetts, Amherst
Mirrilese Fellowship in Creative Writing, Stanford University M.A. Program in English
B.A., Carleton College

Publications and Works in Progress:
Laurie Kutchins’ book of poems, Slope of the Child Everlasting, was published by BOA Editions in May 2007.  She has published two previous books of poems: Between Towns, recipient of the Texas Tech University Press First Book Award, and The Night Path, recipient of the inaugural Isabella Gardner Poetry Award from BOA Editions, Ltd. in 1997, and a Pulitzer Prize nomination.

Her poems and nonfiction lyric essays have appeared widely in journals, including The New Yorker; The Georgia Review; The Kenyon Review; Ploughshares; Poetry; Orion; The Southern Review; LIT; Intima; Journal of Mythic Arts; Southerly; Bellevue Literary Review; Poetrydaily.com; The American Journal of Nursing; West Branch; Drunken Boat; The Eco-Theo Review; Spiritus; Yellow Silk; Nimrod International Journal; Connotation; Blue Mesa; Urthona, Buddhism and the Arts and others.  Her poems and essays have also appeared in various anthologies, including: When She Named Fire: Contemporary Poetry by American Women (Autumn House Press); A Place on Earth: an Anthology of Nature Writing from Australia and North America (University of Nebraska Press); Sweeping Beauty: Contemporary Women Poets on Housework (University of Iowa Press); Birth: a Literary Guide (U. Iowa); Are You Experienced? (University of Iowa Press); Leaning into the Wind: Women Write from the Heart of the West; Woven on the Wind: Women Write about Friendship in the Sagebrush West (Houghton Mifflin); Let There Be Night: Testimonies on Behalf of the Night (University of Nevada, Reno); Arctic Refuge: A Circle of Testimony (Milkweed Editions); To Eat With Grace: Writings from Orion; The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror (St. Martin’s Press); I’m Going to College—Not You! Surviving the College Search with Your Child, (St. Martin’s Griffin Press); Local-Global: Studies in Community Sustainability (Australia).  

Her nonfiction book, Let the Dark River Pass, is currently represented by a literary agent at the Harvey Klinger Agency in New York. She is completing a nonfiction manuscript, Kindred & Shard: Becoming German: a Journey of Ancestral Repair, and also shaping a poetry manuscript, The Altar Jar.

Artist Residencies & Awards:
Kutchins has held artist residencies at The McDowell Colony, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts (VCCA), and twice at the Ucross Foundation. She’s received numerous awards from the Virginia and Pennsylvania State Arts Councils; Research, Teaching and Educational Leave Awards from JMU. She held the inaugural Roop Distinguished Professorship in the English Department at JMU from 2008-2010.  In 2019 Kutchins’ essay, “The Ward is the World” received Honorable Mention in the Annual Kalanithi Award at Stanford University, and was subsequently published in The Kenyon Review’s print and online Fall 2021 issue. 

Teaching Interests:
Kutchins regularly teaches as a faculty member at the Jackson Hole Writers Conference and for many years was a faculty poet at the Taos Summer Writers Conference. At JMU Kutchins teaches workshops on poetry writing, the environmental imagination, poetic craft and creativity, and special topics courses in the Creative Writing Minor. Her teaching style is consistently student-centered and integrative; she empowers students to empower their own voices through the creative process, and through both written and spoken word.

She is a co-founder of the faculty creative arts series, Works in Progress at JMU. She has been active in the Center for Global Studies summer Study Abroad programs in both Ireland and Italy, and has been the faculty in residence for the Semester in Florence Program, in spring 2022.