Patricia Traxler


Patricia Traxler, winner of the 2019 Kansas Book Award in Poetry, is an American poet, essayist, and fiction writer who lives in Salina, Kansas. She is the author of four volumes of poetry, a novel, and a short story collection. Born and raised in San Diego, California, one of eight children in a working-class Irish-Catholic family, Traxler was much influenced by her maternal grandmother, Nora Dunne, a poet from County Cork, Ireland, who lived with the family for several years during Traxler’s childhood.

Biography

Traxler moved to Salina from San Diego in 1980, and later that year was named poet-in-residence of Salina by the Salina Arts and Humanities Commission, a post she held for five years. In 1983, as a component of her residency, she founded Salina's Spring Poetry Reading Series, which is still bringing poets of national repute into Salina each April.
She was named Bunting Poetry Fellow at Radcliffe College in 1990 i. and was awarded a second fellowship year at Radcliffe in 1991, where she finished her third poetry collection, Forbidden Words. In 1996, she was named Hugo Poet at the University of Montana and in 1997 she was made Thurber Poet at the Ohio State University.
Traxler has read, lectured, or served as a visiting poet at many universities including Radcliffe College, Old Dominion University, the University of San Diego, the Ohio State University, Utah State University, San Diego State University, the University of Montana Missoula, Kansas University Lawrence, and Kansas Wesleyan University. Though she enjoys teaching aspiring young poets and fiction writers in a university setting, Traxler is especially drawn to the inspiration and challenge of working as a writer in the community with people of all ages and backgrounds.
Traxler has worked with mainstream and gifted student populations at all academic levels and has developed writing programs and projects for at-risk student teens, deaf and hearing-impaired students, and students with learning disabilities. She has also created grief workshops for adults and children, programs for cancer patients, survivors of domestic violence, residents of homeless shelters, and for mental-health patients and stroke patients in a hospital setting. She taught creative writing at Kansas Wesleyan University, Salina, KS, for 17 years.

Work

Traxler's poetry has appeared in the Boston Review, Ploughshares, The Nation, The Kenyon Review, Slate, Ms. Magazine, the Los Angeles Times, Tikkun, Agni, New Letters and in Best American Poetry.
Traxler's first volume of poetry, Blood Calendar, added humor and a sense of fantasy to the genre of feminist poetry, according to Library Journal.
In 1988, she published a local history anthology of people from the Salina area. To create the book, Traxler advertised that she would "be happy to help anyone trying to get his or her memories onto paper."
Traxler's 1994 book of poetry, Forbidden Words, examines the process of writing and giving voices to the voiceless. Publisher's Weekly wrote that "These poems strike a thrilling balance between personal disclosure and the rigors of writing."
Her first novel, Blood, is a literary thriller. The story's descriptions were considered "especially vivid" by Library Journal and showed her poetic roots. Publisher's Weekly, however, felt that "in the end the book conveys the thick and clotted feeling of too much emotion and not enough thought."

Selected bibliography