Traci Brimhall

Professor / Graduate Faculty
Ph.D. 2014, Western Michigan University. M.F.A. 2008, Sarah Lawrence College.

Email: brimhall@ksu.edu
Office: English/Counseling Services Bldg. 111
Phone: (785) 532-0388

Fields of interest:
Creative Writing (Poetry and Nonfiction); Poetry.

Traci Brimhall teaches creative writing, with an emphasis on poetry. Her other academic interests include hybrid forms, graphic novels, and narrative medicine. She's the author of five collections of poetry: Love Prodigal (Copper Canyon, 2024); Come the Slumberless to the Land of Nod (Copper Canyon, 2020); Saudade (Copper Canyon, 2017); Our Lady of the Ruins (W.W. Norton, 2012), selected by Carolyn Forché for the Barnard Women Poets Prize; and Rookery (Southern Illinois University Press, 2010), winner of the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry First Book Award. Her work has received numerous awards, including: the Just Desserts Short Fiction Prize from Passages North (selected by Roxane Gay), the Annie Dillard Award for Creative Nonfiction from Bellingham Review (selected by Sue William Silverman), the Jane Geske Award for poetry from Prairie Schooner (selected by Kwame Dawes), the Cecil Hemley Award from the Poetry Society of America (selected by Sally Wen Mao), and a Pushcart Prize.

Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, The Believer, Slate, The New Republic, Ploughshares, and Best American Poetry 2013 & 2014. Her essays have appeared in Georgia Review, Southern Review, Fourth Genre, Gulf Coast, Brevity, and listed as a notable essay in Best American Essays 2017. She’s received fellowships from the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, the King/Chávez/Parks Foundation, the National Parks Service, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Additionally, she is the Poet Laureate of Kansas (2023-2026).