Arlington Poet Spotlight

Katherine E. Young is a Virginia poet whose work is inspired by the marvelous state she lives in.

Woman Drinking Absinthe was published by Alan Squire Publishing in March 2021. The poems concern themselves with transgressions committed in the name of love, and include themes of lust, betrayal, guilt, redemption. In the book, Young employs fairy tales, opera, Impressionism, Japonisme, Euclidean geometry, Greek tragedy, wine, figs, and a little black magic to probe what it means to be a woman in the modern epoch.

The second book, Written in Arlington, was compiled and edited by Young thanks to a 2020 Individual Artist Grant from Arlington County. At the time she received the grant, Young knew of exactly four poems about Arlington, three of which she’d written herself as the County’s inaugural poet laureate. The printed collection (there is also a separate, ongoing digital collection) includes 150 poems from 87 poets (originally written in 4 languages), all of them connected to Arlington, Virginia. The poets whose work appears in Written in Arlington range from nationally known page poets to spoken word artists to high school students just beginning to write and perform, as well as a few “tourist” poets who have written about Arlington while passing through. Taken together, they compose a “portrait in poetry” of the community that sits just across the Potomac River from Washington, DC.


Bio: Katherine E. Young is the author of two poetry collections, Woman Drinking Absinthe and Day of the Border Guards (2014 Miller Williams Arkansas Poetry Prize finalist); she is the editor of Written in Arlington. Young is also the translator of Look at Him by Anna Starobinets (Honorable Mention, 2021 Heldt Prize for Best Translation in Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Women’s and Gender Studies); Farewell, Aylis by Azerbaijani political prisoner Akram Aylisli; and two poetry collections, Blue Birds and Red Horses and Two Poems, by Inna Kabysh. Young’s translations of contemporary Russophone poetry and prose have won national and international awards and been widely published; several translations have been made into short films. Young was named a 2020 Arlington County (Virginia) Individual Artist Grant recipient, a 2017 National Endowment for the Arts translation fellow, and a 2015 Hawthornden Fellow (Scotland). From 2016-2018, she served as the inaugural poet laureate for Arlington, Virginia. https://katherine-young-poet.com/

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