Interviews for the Colorado Poets Center:

Interviews with David Mason, Nancy Viera, and Wendy Videlock

Interviews with Uche Ogbuji, Emily Perez, and Ahja Fox

Into The Beautiful Rightness of Magnificent Errors, by Poet Sheryl Luna, winner of the 2020 Ernest Sandeen Poetry Prize.

Flowering Within the Landscapes of Sorrow: A Conversation with Poet Claudia Putnam, winner of the 2020 Moon City Poetry Award.

Abigail Chabitnoy on Poetry and  How To Dress A Fish,

An Interview with Susan Tichy on the “demands and ecstasies” of North|Rock|Edge: Shetland 2017/2019 (Parlor Press 2022)

An Interview with Jennifer Stewart Fueston on Between the Sexual and the Spiritual: A Journey of Faith
 Madonna,Complex (Cascade Books 2020)

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A Selection of Articles and Essays and interviews on my work

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Split Rock Review: Cow Ponds and Glass Frogs: On Using the Poetry Prompt

For a long time, too long, I was a poet with a vocabulary needle stuck on muck and scum and their, well, my reflexive associations with midwestern farm ponds. Not that there is anything wrong with muck and scum and their long list, um, short list of thesaurus buddies like mud, manure, muck, and algae (though I just saw, whoa!, dross),but . . . (read more)

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SunLit Interview: In “Slow Arrow,” Kathryn Winograd wove threads of her mother’s voice

The author wrote the essay “Skyglow,” one of the last in her collection, after her mother moved to Colorado and they developed a “companionable routine”

Excerpt from Slow Arrow: Skyglow

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Bathing (Again) at 9600 Ft by Jill Christman, River Teeth Editor, on Slow Arrow: Unearthing the Frail Children.

Slow Arrow: Unearthing the Frail Children has a sub-subtitle that appears only on the title page: Essays from 9600 feet, an ascension to yet another layer, so Winograd. I will begin at that altitude, in the Colorado cabin Winograd built with her husband Leonard—who features frequently in these pages as voice of reason, asker of crucial questions (“Where are the bees?”), cracker of jokes, w atcher of sky, and bearer of arachnid mercy in the form of an oft-used spider jar. 

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The Humble Essayist on my Intimacies of Revision and Leonard Winograd’s The Physics of Sorrow.

So here it is. Our first husband and wife team at The Humble Essayist! Leonard Winograd is a playwright who taught English and literature at the Community College of Denver for over 30 years. Kathryn Winograd, poet and essayist, teaches creative writing at the Regis Mile-High MFA. Her most recent book is Slow Arrow: Unearthing the Frail Children.

—THE

You can find Leonard’s essay in River Teeth 21:1 and those with access to Project Muse can read it here. Kathryn’s full essay can be found at Essay Daily here.

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Interview with Ken Lutes for the Denver NorthStar, Regis Prof Winograd Explores Nature in New Book of Essays

“In Florissant, there was this ancient volcano that erupted all the time, and that’s why there’s all those fossils there.” Regis University professor and poet Kathryn Winograd is talking about Florissant Fossil Beds National Monument, in Teller County. It’s in this part of Colorado where she found inspiration for her newest book of essays, “Slow Arrow: Unearthing the Frail Children.”

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The Humble Essayist on Slow Arrow: Unearthing the Frail Children

A video commentary: We are celebrating a new book of braided, lyrical essays written by poet and essayist, Kathryn Winograd, published this week by Saddle Road Press. Called Slow Arrow: Unearthing the Frail Children, the book about change and loss weaves many threads: the fragile beauty of the Colorado Rockies, the migration of animals, unearthed fossils, gravitational waves, the arrow of time, dying animals, and a warming planet to name a few. One thread includes her aging mother who suffers from macular degeneration and hopes to die before she goes completely blind. In the essay “Skyglow” Winograd offers her mother a gift: the possibility of a luminosity that outlasts our lives.

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“The title of my last book is Phantom Canyon: Essays of Reclamation. I am surrounded by and in nature. I write outside. I write at a table by the window. Nature is all the clichés. It brings me solace, and it brings me wisdom, and it brings me spirituality. A lot of the essays in Phantom Canyon came from short journal exercises. I would write at night after being out. I would try to remember what I’d seen. And then as I went back to them later, I realized there were images and moments I needed to develop into an essay. I think that’s how. It’s being out, it’s walking, it’s observing and just experiencing, and then coming in. And whether its writing something down in a journal or else putting it into an essay that you’re working on, all that comes together. My heart is in nature.”

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In the Nature of Prose Poetry Colorado Poets Center

In Ohio, they never touched ground, hovered just beyond, their hearts thin as dimes, until their slotted wings vibrated into whirr and whistle.  We believed this about hummingbirds: that death stalked their stillness, that to sit or sleep was as foreign to them as to the sharks that hulked beneath our primitive dreams of fish and flotsam.  But here the mountain hummingbirds, migrated by star or fireweed, hover momentarily, then spin into each other, territorial, sharp-needled, vanquishing each other from the sugar water I boil each time I come here.  And then they sit . . . read more

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Note to Self: on the Lyric Essay , Colorado Poets Center

I must confess that what I first want to tell you is a lie.  That what propelled me to creative nonfiction was the owl my husband and I stalked in a ragged stretch of woods along the South Platte River some long winters ago, that symbolic air, I’ll want to tell you, thick with the crash and grind of a cement factory that halted only on Sundays in deference to a holiness I couldn’t name.  What I won’t want to tell you is that it was really the words of a humble Southern essayist— . . . read more

Jill Christman on “Bathing”from Phantom Canyon

You know how you remember where you were, who you were with, and what you were doing when you listened to such-and-such a song, maybe for the first time? Like Pink Floyd’s “Wish You Were Here” when no doubt you should not have been there, and certainly not with that crowd, under those conditions, in a smoky basement apartment with black lights on Oglethorpe Avenue in Savannah? Right. You do. 

This is how it is for me with the first essay I ever heard from what has become Phantom Canyon—Bathing . . . read more

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“Bathing” as an example for In Conclusion: Tips to Create a Memorable Ending for Your Narrative Essay: Writing Center Underground

As difficult as it is to begin a personal narrative essay, wrapping it up can be even more challenging. Writers often fall into the trap of tying the narrative up too neatly, telling the readers what they are supposed to take away from their story instead of letting the reader come to their own conclusions. Study a few essays from some of the great writers and notice how they conclude their stories. read more

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with r.kv.r.y quarterly literary journal on Afterward: A draft

Joan Hanna: We were so excited to have “Afterward: a Draft” in our April issue of r.kv.r.y. This was a personal and intimate piece about a rape that took place in the early 70s. Can you share a little with our readers about how the passage of time factored into your perspective?
read more

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AWP: In the Spotlight: Kathryn Winograd from 2017

What is the best writing advice that you dispense to your students?
My best writing advice to my students is to “honor your work.” That means at every stage, even when you want to tear it to shreds and tell yourself for the umpteenth time that you’re just not a writer, and…well, you know the drill. Write the best that you can at this moment, nurture it, believe in it, and present it to the world with the honor it deserves. I remember one student who sent her first piece, a beautiful lyrical essay to her stillborn infant daughter, to an “unknown writer’s” contest. Not only was it rejected, but one of the judges made an insensitive remark that was more about her lack of knowledge than a problem with the piece. At our creative writing capstone reading, I read the essay out loud for my student to an awestruck audience, so that she could realize its beauty, too, and honor it. Read More.