Please join 2025 Birdy Poetry Prize Winner Catherine Anderson
for a reading and discussion of Afloat!
When: December 15th, 7 p.m. CT
Where: Zoom (click link to join)
Get your copy of Afloat HERE!
.png)
In Afloat, Catherine Anderson inspects the world around her with the detail of a scientist, the imagery of a painter, and the introspection of a philosopher. Through frequently “quotidian” scenarios—learning to knit, cutting rhubarb, purchasing flowers at the grocery store—Anderson ruminates on themes of love, spirituality, and justice, celebrating the beauty and wonder around us but not shying away from the loss and pain that so often accompany them. These poems saint all they touch—feather dancers, bell ringers, rubber pastries, tardigrades—revealing the holy in the everyday and the profound ties that connect us to each other, the natural world, and all that has come before. Winner of the 2025 Birdy Poetry Prize by Meadowlark Press.
About the Author:
Catherine Anderson has published five collections of poetry, including Everyone I Love Immortal (Woodley Press, 2019), Woman with a Gambling Mania (Mayapple Press, 2014), The Work of Hands (Perugia Press, 2000), In the Mother Tongue (Alice James Books, 1983), and Afloat (Meadowlark Press, 2025). In 2022, a memoir about her late brother who had nonspeaking autism, My Brother Speaks in Dreams: Of Family, Beauty & Belonging, was published by Wising Up Press. She has been recognized for her poetry by the Massachusetts Artists’ Foundation, the Southern Humanities Review, the I-70 Review and the Crab Orchard Review. Over the years, her poems have also appeared in the Southern Review, the Harvard Review, and the Dunes Review, among many others. She lives in Kansas City, where she has worked for over twenty years assisting new immigrants and refugees to become skilled interpreters. Learn more about Catherine at www.catherineanderson.uno
A Word from the 2025 Birdy Poetry Prize Judge, Jose Faus, author of The Life and Times of José Calderon:
The punch of certain lines concusses long after you’ve closed Afloat— “From a darkness known only to her / into a light both of us could see”—the author explores the many facets, triumphs, illusions, delusions, highs and lows of being mother, daughter, sister, lover, teacher, creator, nurturer, icon, and rebel. In forceful narrative poems part memoir, lyric, ode, elegy, manifesto, a vibrant musicality, urgent in its revelations, carries from gasp to gasp. These are challenging and captivating cadences. Worth every round.
Catherine Anderson has published five collections of poetry, including Everyone I Love Immortal (Woodley Press, 2019), Woman with a Gambling Mania (Mayapple Press, 2014), The Work of Hands (Perugia Press, 2000), In the Mother Tongue (Alice James Books, 1983), and Afloat (Meadowlark Press, 2025). In 2022, a memoir about her late brother who had nonspeaking autism, My Brother Speaks in Dreams: Of Family, Beauty & Belonging, was published by Wising Up Press. She has been recognized for her poetry by the Massachusetts Artists’ Foundation, the Southern Humanities Review, the I-70 Review and the Crab Orchard Review. Over the years, her poems have also appeared in the Southern Review, the Harvard Review, and the Dunes Review, among many others. She lives in Kansas City, where she has worked for over twenty years assisting new immigrants and refugees to become skilled interpreters. Learn more about Catherine at www.catherineanderson.uno
A Word from the 2025 Birdy Poetry Prize Judge, Jose Faus, author of The Life and Times of José Calderon:
The punch of certain lines concusses long after you’ve closed Afloat— “From a darkness known only to her / into a light both of us could see”—the author explores the many facets, triumphs, illusions, delusions, highs and lows of being mother, daughter, sister, lover, teacher, creator, nurturer, icon, and rebel. In forceful narrative poems part memoir, lyric, ode, elegy, manifesto, a vibrant musicality, urgent in its revelations, carries from gasp to gasp. These are challenging and captivating cadences. Worth every round.
