About Me

Genevieve Kaplan

I grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area and went to school at Southern Oregon University, UC Santa Cruz, and the Iowa Writers' Workshop. Then I lived in Reno for a while. I recently completed my PhD in Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Southern California, and I live outside Los Angeles.

My book In the ice house, won the A Room of Her Own Foundation's To the Lighthouse poetry prize and was published by Red Hen Press. You can read some of my thoughts about "The Landscape," a series in In the ice house, on the Poetry Society of America website. A chapbook of continual erasures, settings for these scenes, was published by Convulsive Editions in 2013; I explain my process of "writing" this chapbook of erasures here. travelogue, a long poem drafted while attending Bloomsday events in Dublin, Ireland, is available from Dancing Girl Press, and you can get my chapbook In an aviary at Grey Book Press. You can take a look at my Books  and Poems pages for more information about these books and links to other online publications.

I'm always involved in the literary community -- I teach poetry and creative writing courses, give frequent readings from my work, and am a board member of the Fourth Sundays: Poetry at the Claremont Library reading series. One of my day jobs is working with the Kingsley & Kate Tufts Poetry Awards at Claremont Graduate University. I teach first-year writing courses at Scripps College in the fall, and in spring semesters you can find me teaching Creative Writing, Poetry Writing, and Book Arts courses privately and at local universities. I'm also an editor and publisher -- my husband and I have been running the Toad Press international chapbook series since 2003, publishing contemporary literary translations. Check it out! My past activities have included volunteering with the Prison Library Project and serving as one of Red Hen Press's teaching-authors in their Writers-in-the-Schools program.

I've created this book blog to keep an informal record of contemporary (and not so contemporary) found/altered/treated/appropriated books, paying particular attention to artists' books, found-objects, literary constraint, and contemporary poetry & poetics -- some of my research interests. You can read '"Destroying' the Text to Create the poem," my essay about artists' books, appropriated texts, and erasure practices in contemporary poetry online at Post45 Contemporaries. An essay about my own experiences using generative source texts, "Un-collage, Excise, Re-collage: 'Ladies in An Aviary'" is over at Opon; my chapbook In an aviary, which is alluded to in the essay, is available from Grey Book Press.

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Want to get in touch? Please email me here. Find me on twitter @genevievekaplan and on facebook.

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Looking for a short, press-ready bio? Here's one you can use:  

Genevieve Kaplan is the author of In the ice house (Red Hen Press), winner of the A Room of Her Own Foundation's poetry publication prize, and three chapbooks: In an aviary (Grey Book Press, 2016); travelogue (Dancing Girl, 2016); and settings for these scenes (Convulsive Editions, 2013), a chapbook of continual erasures. She lives in southern California and edits the Toad Press International chapbook series, publishing contemporary translations of poetry and prose.