Kathleene K. West

Born 1947-12-28 Genoa, NE (USA)

Died 2013-07-15
Las Cruces, NM (USA)

Buried
Genoa, NE (USA)

West worked in the "Poet-in-the-School" programs in Washington State and in Nebraska. She apprenticed as a letter-press printer with Copper Canyon Press and with Abbatoir Editions before pursuing her doctorate in literature. She published numerous collections of poetry. Her poetry appeared in All My Grandmothers Could Sing. See review in Prairie Schooner by Stephen Behrendt. West did research and travelled extensively in Cuba, Viet Nam, Cambodia, Beijing, Mexico, Latin America (Costa Rica, Guatemala, Nicaragua), Iceland, and the United Kingdom. She was a Fulbright scholar, spending two years in Iceland and was Professor of Poetry at New Mexico State University.

West worked as a reader of fiction for Prairie Schooner, and was poetry editor, Puerto del Sol at New Mexico State University.

Places Lived

Genoa, NE (1947-1967)
Lincoln, NE (1967-1969, 1982-83, 1985-87)
Wayne, NE (1980-81)
Omaha, NE (1981-82)
Texas
Washington
ICELAND
Minnesota
New Mexico

Author Of

Fiction
Poetry

Keywords

Creative Writing; Translation; Editing; Nebraska Subjects; Great Plains Subjects

Education

Bachelor of Arts Degree, 1967, University of Nebraska, Lincoln, NE
Master of Arts Degree, 1975, University of Washington, Seattle, WA
Ph.D, 1986, University of Nebraska - Lincoln, Lincoln, NE

Occupation

Teacher
Professor of English and Creative Writing, New Mexico State University
Printer and Book Designer
Poet

Places Worked

Public Schools in Nebraska and Texas
Apprentice, Copper Canyon Press, Townsend WA, 1978-79
Poet in Schools in Nebraska and Washington, 1975-81
Teaching Assistant, University of Nebraska -Lincoln, 1985-85
Professor at New Mexico State University, Las Cruces, NM
Prairie Schooner

Honors

John H. Ames Reading Series, Featured Reader, 21 November 1985 and 15 April 2004
Fulbright scholar, ICELAND, 1983-85
Icelandic Government Scholar, 1983-84
Kenneth Patchen Prize for The Road to Mandalay.
Artist of the Year for Water Witching
Omaha Library Award, 1982

Associations

Elizabeth Bishop
Harry Duncan
Madeline DeFrees
David Wagoner

Bibliography

No Warning. 1977.
The Armadillo on the Rug. 1978.
Land Bound. 1978.
For My Brother, Kuzma. 1981.
The Garden Section. 1982.
Water Witching. 1984.
Plainswoman. 1985.
Songs for the Granddaughters. 1986. (chapbook of poetry by Friends of the Lincoln - Lancaster Commission on the Status of Women)
The Farmer's Daughter. 1988.
Leaning Into the Wind, 1997. (Contributor)
Death of a Regional Poet, Canto 1 1999.
The Road to Mandalay. 1999.
Romance Tercermundista/ Third World Romance. 2000. (bilingual)
Woven on the Wind. 2001.
The Summer of the Sub-Comandante, a novel. 2002.
Nebraska Presence: An Anthology of Poetry. 2007.
Nebraska Poetry: A Sesquicentennial Anthology, 1867-2017 (Contributor)
Nebraska: The Individual Voice. n.d.

Contributor to: Woman Poet, The West, Rapunzel, Rapunzel, Great Plains Poetry Anthology, All My Grandmothers Could Sing.

Kathleene West's presentations at the Ames Reading Series can be seen here:

November 1985:

April 2004:

We appreciate corrections and additions to our information about authors, but please read the following guidelines and caveats carefully.

The Nebraska Authors database is based on publicly available sources. Unless you are the author contacting us in person, it helps us if you cite the source or sources of your information. We cannot include unsourced information in the database.
We may be appreciative of information we choose not to include in the publicly available database.
To include an image on an author profile, please send jpg attachment to nebraskaauthors@lincoln.ne.gov. A photo-release agreement is required before the image will be published on this site.
Because of the way we are staffed, expect corrections or additions to take time, sometimes up to three months.
While we initially included some actual links to external URLs in the database, we will in the future no longer provide functioning links. We will instead record the presence of specific external materials in language that we hope will help intelligent users find it themselves. Web rot, in which actual materials remain online but undergo changes in their URLs, is too demanding in terms of staff time for us to hope to keep external links current.

Please copy, fill out the form below, and email it to heritage@lincoln.ne.gov to suggest a change.