About this item
The events of 1999's Columbine shooting preoccupy Forsythe in these poems, refracting her vision to encompass killer, victim, and herself as a girl, suddenly aware of the precarity of her own life and the porousness of her body to others' gaze, demands, violence. Deeply researched and even more deeply felt, Perennial inhabits landscapes of emerging adulthood and explosive cruelty - the hills of Pittsburgh and the sere grass of Colorado; the spines of books in a high school library that has become a killing ground; the tenderness of children as they grow up and grow hard, becoming acquainted with dread, grief, and loss.
About the Author
A native Pittsburgher, Kelly Forsythe is currently living and writing in Washington, D.C. She is the author of Perennial (Coffee House Press, forthcoming August 2018) , and a digital chapbook of poems, Helix (Floating Wolf Quarterly) . Her work has been published in American Poetry Review, Black Warrior Review, The Literary Review, The Minnesota Review, and Columbia Poetry Review, among others. She was recently featured in American Poet as an Academy of American Poets "Emerging Poet," with an introduction by Noelle Kocot.
For over half a decade, Forsythe was the Director of Publicity for Copper Canyon Press. Prior to working with Copper Canyon, she was a consultant for the web team at the Poetry Foundation, and worked with the marketing team at Poets & Writers Magazine. She has given lectures on publishing and book publicity at NYU, The Academy of American Poets, the Institute of American Indian Arts, and Manhattanville College.
She is on the Board of Directors for the C.D. Wright Women Writers Conference. In addition to her work with Copper Canyon, she was the founder of PHANTOM, an online journal. Forsythe works at National Geographic, where she helps to manage the literary PR strategy for the books division.
