Newsletter sign up

Be the first to know when new American Life in Poetry columns are live.

Cathryn Essinger

Troy, Ohio

Cathryn Essinger has published three books of poetry, including My Dog Does Not Read Plato (2004) and What I Know about Innocence (2009). Her first work, A Desk in the Elephant House (1998), won the Walt McDonald First Book Award from Texas Tech University Press.
 
Her poems have been featured in the Southern Review, New England Review, and Quarterly West. Essinger’s work has also been anthologized in The Poetry Anthology: 1912–2002, Poetry Daily: 366 Poems, and O Taste and See: Food Poems. She has been awarded an Ohio Arts Council Grant and was Ohio’s Poet of the Year in 2005.
 
Essinger teaches at Edison Community College in Piqua, Ohio.


Column 639

Summer Apples