KB Ballentine

KB Ballentine resides in Chattanooga, Tennessee, and teaches composition, creative writing, theatre arts, and literature to high school and college students in addition to conducting writing workshops throughout the United States.

Ballentine received her MFA in Creative Writing, Poetry, from Lesley University, Cambridge, MA.

Ballentine’s eighth collection Spirit of Wild was published with Blue Light Press in March 2023. Other collections of poetry are  Edge of the Echo (Iris Press 2021), The Light Tears Loose (Blue Light Press 2019), Almost Everything, Almost Nothing (Middle Creek Publishing 2017), the 2016 Blue Light Press Book Award winner The Perfume of Leaving was preceded by What Comes of Waiting (2013), also by Blue Light Press. Fragments of Light (2009) and Gathering Stones (2008) were published by Celtic Cat Publishing.

Published in numerous literary journals and anthologies, Ballentine was awarded the Libba Moore Gray Poetry Prize in 2016, in 2014 she was a finalist for the Ron Rash Poetry Award, an Opera Omaha finalist in 2008, a 2007 finalist for the Ruth Stone Prize in Poetry, and in 2006 a finalist for the Joy Harjo Poetry Award. She was a recipient of the Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Prize in 2006 and in 2007.

Learn more about KB Ballentine at www.kbballentine.com.