Denise Low
Denise Low was born in Emporia, Kansas. She received her BA, MA, and PhD (with dissertation honors) in English from the University of Kansas and her MFA in creative writing from Wichita State University.
Low is the author of more than forty books of poetry, essays, and criticism. Her full-length poetry collections are House of Grace, House of Blood (University of Arizona Press, 2024), archival-based poems and the winner of the Nelson Poetry Book Award; Wing (Red Mountain Press, 2021), a finalist for the Hefner Heitz Kansas Book Award; Shadow Light (Red Mountain Press, 2018), winner of Red Mountain Press Editor’s Award; A Casino Bestiary (Spartan Press, 2017); Melange Block (Red Mountain, 2014); Ghost Stories of the New West (Woodley Memorial Press, 2010), a Kansas Notable Book; Thailand Journal (Woodley Memorial Press, 2003), a Kansas City Star Best Book of the Year; New and Selected Poems (Penthe Press, 1999), rereleased in 2009; Tulip Elegies: An Alchemy of Writing (Penthe, 1993); Starwater (Cottonwood Review Press, 1988); and Spring Geese and Other Poems (University of Kansas Natural History Museum Publications, 1984).
Low’s works of prose include the memoir The Turtle’s Beating Heart: One Family’s Story of Lenape Survival (University of Nebraska Press, 2017) and Natural Theologies: Literature of the New Middle West (Backwaters Press, 2011), the first critical study of poets from the Mid-Plains. She also edited Kansas Poems of William Stafford (Woodley Press, 2010).
Low was the second Kansas Poet Laureate. From 2008 to 2013, she was a board member of Associated Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) and board president from 2011 to 2012. She is a founding board member of Indigenous Nations Poets (In-Na-Po). She has taught at the University of Kansas, University of Richmond, and for twenty-seven years at Haskell Indian Nations University. She currently teaches online for Baker University’s School of Professional and Graduate Studies in Baldwin City, Kansas. Low is the publisher at the independent press Mammoth, which focuses on disseminating the work of Indigenous American writers. She is also the literary program director for The 222, an arts organization based in Northern California, where she has lived since 2019.