Catherine Bowman

Catherine Bowman was born in El Paso, Texas. She received an MFA from Columbia University in 1988.

Bowman is the author of several poetry collections, including Can I Finish, Please? (Four Way Books, 2016); The Plath Cabinet (Four Way Books, 2009); and 1-800-HOT-RIBS (Gibbs Smith, 1993), winner of the Peregrine Smith Poetry Prize and the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. 1-800-HOT-RIBS was reissued in 2000 by Carnegie Mellon University Press.

Of her work, Kevin Prufer writes, “These jangling, off-balance, often sneakily meditative poems are among the most interesting and formally inventive I’ve read by any living writer.”

Bowman is also the editor of Word of Mouth: Poems Featured on NPR’s All Things Considered (Vintage Books, 2003), an anthology of poems she presented while serving as the “poetry DJ” on All Things Considered.

Bowman has received fellowships from the Dobie Paisano Fellowship Program and the New York Foundation for the Arts, among others. She currently teaches creative writing at Indiana University and lives in Bloomington, Indiana.