poetry & scholarship : teaching: CV: bio : contact
Kathy
Lou Schultz was born in Burke, South Dakota in 1966 and grew up in
Central Nebraska. As a youth, she may have been a combination of Enid from
Ghost
World and Rory from Gilmore Girls. She flew the coop at
age 18 for New York City, but recommends that you visit The Arch in Kearney,
Nebraska, a.k.a. "The Great Platte River Road Archway Monument" featured
in the film About Schmidt,
starring Jack Nicholson.
A first-generation college student, Kathy Lou did her undergraduate work at Columbia University and Oberlin College, and went on to earn an MFA in poetry and American literature at San Francisco State University. After nearly a decade in the San Francisco Bay Area, Kathy Lou relocated to Philadelphia in 2000, where she is completing a doctoral degree in literature at the University of Pennsylvania where is a dissertation fellow at the Center for Africana Studies. Her dissertation focuses on Afro-Modernist poetry.
Kathy Lou is the author of three books: Re dress (San Francisco State University, 1994) which was selected by Forrest Gander for the Michael Rubin Award, a book-length poem entitled Genealogy (a+bend press, 1999), and a collection of poetry and experimental prose from Atelos Press called Some Vague Wife (2002). She has also published poetry, experimental fiction, book reviews, and essays in a variety of journals, and has essays in collections from Coach House Press and Miami University Press. Her manuscript, Ejection Room, was runner-up for the 2005 Fence Books Alberta Prize.
Kathy Lou edits and publishes Lipstick Eleven, a journal of experimental literature, with Jim Brashear and Robin Tremblay-McGaw. In addition, Kathy Lou is a member of the Editorial Advisory Board of HOW2 , an electronic extension of the 80s journal HOW(ever), focusing on innovative writing and scholarship by contemporary and modernist women writers.
Kathy Lou has been politically active in feminist, anti-racist, and peace movements since she was a teenager. Some of her activities include working as a women and children's advocate and community educator for battered women's shelters in Lincoln, Nebraska; Harlem, New York; and Elyria, Ohio. She also actively organized against (the first) Gulf War, and continues to support grassroots peace-building activities.
factoids
favorite tv show: Six Feet Under
favorite movie scene: the photobooth scene in Buffalo 66 with
Vincent Gallo and Christina Ricci
least known accomplishment: blue ribbon winner at the Nebraska State
Fair for knitted slippers
first poetry pulication: Mirage Period(ical) edited by Kevin
Killian & Dodie Bellamy (1993)