Karen Swenson

She grew up in Chappaqua, New York, and studied at Barnard College and New York University.[1]

Swenson has been Poet-in-Residence at Skidmore College, the University of Idaho, University of Denver, Clark University, Scripps College and Barnard College. She taught at City College, New York.[2]

Her work has appeared in The New York Times,[3] The Beloit Poetry Journal,[4] Paris Review,[5] American Poetry Review, "Saturday Review", and "The New Yorker".

• 1993 National Poetry Series, for The Landlady in Bangkok
• Lannan Residency [6]
• Yaddo Residencies

• A daughter's latitude: new & selected poems. Copper Canyon Press. 1999. ISBN 978-1-55659-094-8.
• The landlady in Bangkok. Copper Canyon Press. 1994. ISBN 978-1-55659-067-2.
• A sense of direction. Smith. 1989. ISBN 978-0-912292-85-4.
• East-West: poems. Confluence Press. 1980. ISBN 978-0-917652-23-3.
• An attic of ideals. Doubleday. 1974. ISBN 978-0-385-08073-6.

For a poet, the value of travel has more to do with the self a writer brings to a place than any impression he or she takes from the landscape or the people there. Karen Swenson has traveled extensively over the past four decades, and in A Daughter's Latitude she reports not only on visits to countries like Malaysia and Thailand but also on her return trips to the provinces of childhood memory.[7]

• Marlene D. Allen (2002). "Karen Swenson". In Catherine Cucinella (ed.). Contemporary American women poets: an A-to-Z guide. Greenwood Publishing Group. ISBN 978-0-313-31783-5.
• Janet Palmer Mullaney, ed. (1998). "Karen Swenson". Truthtellers of the times: interviews with contemporary women poets. University of Michigan Press. ISBN 978-0-472-06680-3.
• "Woodrow Wilson Visiting Fellow Karen Swenson, a Poet, Journalist and World Traveler, at Centenary Nov. 15-19"