Katherine Soniat's third collection, A Shared Life, won the Iowa Poetry Prize, and also a Virgina Prize for Poetry. Notes of Departure was awarded the Camden Poetry Prize from the Walt Whitman Center for the Arts and Humanities. She is a recipient of a Virginia Commission for the Arts Fellowship, the William Faulkner Prize, and an Ann Stanford Prize. Her poems have appeared in such literary journals as The Nation, The New Republic, Southern Review, Virginia Quarterly, Gettysburg Review, and TriQuarterly. An associate professor of English at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, she lives in Blacksburg, Virginia.

About Alluvial:

"Alluvial blends the personal and historical. Soniat doesn't forget the slave block and the ship holds when she looks at her native land. In a literary world where style and autobiography reign, I would hope this book might open up dialogue on how poetry might even more engage public themes without losing its personal core. This is a woman's voice, solidly and significantly, but it is also a fully expansive and human voice. These poems are handled with skill and grace; they are both accessable and intelligent."
—Betsy Sholl

" Katherine Soniat's powerful new collection of poems, Alluvial, charts the transforming courses of histories both public and private. Remarkably, she traces the patterns of what rises, falls and arises again through the passages of experience, as we watch storms of psychological sediment constellating — what settles and what is left, those residual nutrients of our futures — as the tides of our lives subside. These voices and testimonies reflect how lives lived by water articulate both intimate and historically charged fluctuations. Katherine Soniat knows that life begins in the water and that we all remain subject to water's constant reckonings. Alluvial is an inspired collection of poems."
—David St. John