Poets
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B. K. Fischer
B. K. Fischer was born in New York. She holds a BA from the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars, an MFA in poetry from Columbia University, and a PhD in English and American literature from New York University.
Fischer is the author of Ceive (BOA Editions, 2021), a finalist for the 2021 National Book Critics Circle Award; Radioapocrypha (Ohio State University Press, 2018), winner of The Journal Charles B. Wheeler Poetry Prize; My Lover’s Discourse (Tinderbox Editions, 2018); St. Rage’s Vault (The Word Works, 2013), winner of the Washington Prize; and Mutiny Gallery (Truman State University Press, 2011), winner of the T. S. Eliot Prize.
The author of Museum Mediations: Reframing Ekphrasis in Contemporary American Poetry (Routledge, 2006), Fischer is former poetry editor of Boston Review and teaches The Comma Sutra in the School of the Arts at Columbia University. She lives in Sleepy Hollow, New York and is currently the first poet laureate of Westchester County. In 2022, Fischer received an Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellowship.
Poet Laureate of Westchester County, NY
In 2022, B. K. Fischer was named an Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellow. In collaboration with ArtsWestchester, Fischer will start the Floodwaters Workshops, an outdoor writing workshop series at sites of flooding and flood risk in Westchester County, to bring poetry into the local conversation about climate. The workshops will explicitly mark the intersection of the climate crisis, conservation, and social injustice. The project will culminate in the creation of a short documentary film that tells the story of the workshops’ movements through diverse communities and varied landscapes, recording student performances and interviews as well as their encounters with these environments. The workshops will focus on high school students, especially youth in underserved communities and queer youth, and will be adapted to include recently or currently incarcerated students and seniors in community settings. Participants will develop indigenous land acknowledgments tied to particular locales where Wappinger, Lenape, and Mahican peoples have stewarded the lands and waterways of what is now Westchester County.