She "became famous, finally, to herself," Kathleen Flenniken writes. This is the kind of fame at the heart of most lives and at the center of Flenniken's first collection, winner of the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry. Here, "a little voice sings/from the back of the auditorium/of my throat. Aren't all of us/waiting to be discovered?" The poet's answer is sometimes grave, sometimes comic, but always tuned to the incidental music of daily life. Kathleen Flenniken's poems have appeared in "Poetry", "Iowa Review", "Mid-American Review", "Southern Review", and "Prairie Schooner". Coeditor and president of Floating Bridge Press, a publisher of Washington State poets, Flenniken has taught poetry through Writers in the Schools and other arts agencies.

Kathleen Flenniken's poems have appeared in Poetry, The Iowa Review, The Southern Review, Mid-American Review, Farm Pulp, Prairie Schooner, and Poetry Daily. She is the recipient of a 2005 Literary Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and a 2003 Literary Fellowship from Artist Trust, along with grants from Artist Trust and Seattle Office of Arts and Culture. Her first collection of poems, Famous, has been named a Notable Book of the Year by the American Library Association (ALA). Kathleen is a co-editor and president of Floating Bridge Press, an all-volunteer non-profit press dedicated to publishing Washington State poets. She's taught poetry in the schools through the Washington State Arts Commission, Writers in the Schools, Powerful Partners, Northwest School, and led poetry workshops for students of all ages. She grew up in Richland, in Eastern Washington and is a Northwesterner through and through, a daughter of Oregonians. She moved to Seattle in her twenties to marry, and her husband and three children still live there. She came to poetry late, after earning B.S. and M.S. degrees in Civil Engineering from Washington State University and University of Washington, and working eight years as an engineer and hydrologist, three on the Hanford Nuclear Reservation. She started writing when she quit work to stay home with our children. For years her subject has been domestic, ordinary life. She sees herself as a natural historian of interiors. This is the focus of Famous. Her work recently has taken a turn, and she's in the midst of a series of poems about growing up near and working at Hanford, where plutonium was produced for the atomic bomb. The new work is fueled by her growing distress about her country's future