Of Poetry Podcast Corrie Williamson (Of Wilderness, Animal Bodies, and Ecotones of Harm)
Of Poetry is hosted by Han VanderHart, author of Larks (Ohio UP, 2025).
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Purchase: Your Mother's Bear Gun (River River Books, 2025)
Read: "You're Hoarding Guns, I'm Growing Herbs" (Kenyon Review)
Corrie Williamson was born on a small farm in southwestern Virginia. She is the author of three books of poetry, most recently Your Mother’s Bear Gun, which is newly out from River River Books. Her other books are The River Where You Forgot My Name, in the Crab Orchard Series, which was named a 2019 Montana Book Award Honor Book by the Montana Library Association; and Sweet Husk, which won the 2014 Perugia Press Prize, and was a finalist for the 2015 Library of Virginia Poetry Award. She is also co-editor, with poets Anne Haven McDonnell and Kamella Cruz, of the in-progress eco-poetry anthology A Literary Field Guide to the Rocky Mountains.
She completed her undergraduate degree at the University of Virginia, with a BA in Poetry and Anthropology, and her MFA in Poetry from the University of Arkansas, where she was a recipient of the Walton Fellowship, and a Director of the Writers in the Schools Program. She has taught writing at the University of Arkansas, Helena College, and Carroll College, and worked as an educator in Yellowstone National Park. She was the recipient of the 2020 PEN Margery Davis Boyden Wilderness Writing Residency, spending seven and a half months writing and living off-grid in a remote section of the Rogue River in southwest Oregon. Her poems have appeared in journals such as The Southern Review, Ecotone, The Kenyon Review, The Missouri Review, AGNI, Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, and many others. You can also find her work in anthologies such as Cascadia Field Guide; Environmental and Nature Writing Volume II: A Writer’s Guide and Anthology; The Ecopoetry Anthology: Volume II; and Bright Bones: An Anthology of Contemporary Montana Writing. She lives in Lewistown, Montana.
Recommended Reading:
Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek and The Abundance