Kathryn Kirkpatrick was born in Columbia, South Carolina, and grew up in the Phillipines, Germany, Texas and the Carolinas. Today she lives with her husband and two shelties in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina where she is Professor of English at Appalachian State University.

Books by Kathryn Kirkpatrick: Out of the Garden, Beyond Reason, Border Crossings: Irish Women Writers and National Identities, The Body's Horizon,

Other poems on the web by Kathryn Kirkpatrick:
"When she left"
Two poems
Three poems
"First Mammogram"
"The Bees"

About Out of the Garden:

"Out of the Garden manages to achieve that most desirable and yet most difficult work, the weaving together of woman's body and woman's mind. Here is a voice that speaks to physical passion and passionate thought, to choices that line by line, 'undo/ the careful silences.' Kathryn Kirkpatrick's words make their way through the wounding brambles and the seductive aromas of sex, loss, anger, betrayal, and desire, for desire is at the heart of these poems' dynamic movement toward clarity. In language that is never coy or self-indulgent, she plunges out of the garden's innocence and into a world that is always shapeshifting, both seducing and humbling her; and brings her to her knees in sheer sensual awareness of its pulsing vitality."
—Kathryn Stripling Byer

"Kathryn Kirkpatrick's new poems draw us in through the authenticity and passion of their voices, and they keep us reading for the compelling stories they tell, as well as for the grace and lyricism of their language. Inventive, reflective, alive to the complexities of human relationships, they accomplish what our best poems always do: the creation of worlds we find simultaneously recognizable and startling in their revelations."
—Susan Ludvigson

"'This is the world we have made,' Kathryn Kirkpatrick tells us in this compelling book of poems, and hers is a dark and troubled world—full of loss, betrayal, and regret. But it is Kirpatrick's unblinking gaze and hard-won wisdom that makes Out of the Garden so powerful, as well as why these poems will linger in readers' minds and hearts long after the last page is turned."
—Ron Rash