KC Trommer
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About

KC Trommer is the author of the chapbook The Hasp Tongue (dancing girl press, 2014). A graduate of the MFA program at The University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, KC has been the recipient of an Academy of American Poets Prize and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her poem "Fear Not, Mary" won the 2015 Fugue Poetry Prize. She has been awarded fellowships from the Table 4 Writers Foundation, the Center for Book Arts, the Vermont Studio Center, the Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, and the Prague Summer Program. Her poems have appeared in Agni, The Antioch Review, Day One, Octopus, The Sycamore Review, Prairie Schooner, Poetry East and a number of other journals. He recent work has appeared in the anthologies Resist Much, Obey Little and Bared. Hear poems here.

KC studied collage and painting at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, School for Visual Arts, and Parsons. Her collage work has been featured in group and solo shows in Ann Arbor and New York City. She lives in Jackson Heights, Queens with her son.

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KC Trommer is an award-winning poet, curator, and collaborative artist whose work bridges poetry, visual art, and community engagement. She is the author of two full-length collections, We Call Them Beautiful (Diode Editions, 2019), winner of the Diode Editions Book Prize, and Paragones, which explores the lives and works of female-identifying artists, and one chapbook: The Hasp Tongue (dancing girl press, 2014). A Spanish-language edition of We Call Them Beautiful, translated by the Chilean poet Elisa Montesinos, is under contract with Cuarto Propio.

Since 2016, KC has collaborated with the Grammy Award-winning composer Herschel Garfein, who created the song cycle “Three Rides” for soprano, cello, and piano from her work. In 2023, Garfein released the album The Layers, which includes “Three Rides,” as well as songs inspired by the poems of Stanley Kunitz and Jane Kenyon.

KC founded the collaborative poetry project QUEENSBOUND in 2018; the project launched its 4th edition in 2024 with a celebratory reading by contributors on a Flushing-bound 7 train. From 2020 to 2023, she curated and ran the Red Door Series, a poetry and meditation series begun by Spencer Reece and held at St. Mark’s Church in Jackson Heights, and welcomed over 75 poets to the series from across Queens and the world. From 2021 to 2023, KC was poet-in-residence on Governors Island, first through the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s COVID-19 Response Residency Program, then with Works on Water, and then through NYU Gallatin’s WetLab.

A graduate of the MFA program at The University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, KC has been recognized with an Academy of American Poets Prize, an Editor’s Prize from CRAFT Literary, a Fugue Poetry Prize, and Pushcart Prize nominations. Her poems have appeared in AGNI, The Antioch Review, Best American Poetry, Blackbird, CRAFT Literary, The Common, Diode, LitHub, MER, The Sycamore Review, Poetry Daily, Poetry East, Prairie Schooner, Poets.org, SWWIM, Radio Lab, as well as in the anthologies Braving the Body, Resist Much, Obey Little; All We Can Hold; Bared; and Who Will Speak for America? Poems from Paragones are forthcoming in The Georgia Review and the Chautauqua Anthology. Her essays have appeared in LitHub and in the anthology Oh, Baby! True Stories About Conception, Adoption, Surrogacy, Pregnancy, Labor, and Love (Creative Nonfiction, 2015). 

KC’s work has been recognized and supported by the Center for Book Arts, City Artist Corps, Flushing Town Hall, the Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, Hewnoaks, the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center, Onassis Foundation USA, the Prague Summer Program, the Sustainable Arts Foundation, the Queens Council on the Arts, the Queens Museum, the Vermont Studio Center, and Works on Water.

She has taught writing at NYU Gallatin, Poets House, Catapult, the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor; Bard High School Early College, Queens; and the University of Pennsylvania. She lives in Jackson Heights, Queens, with her son.