K.C. Trommer

Poet and essayist KC Trommer is the author of the award-winning poetry collection We Call Them Beautiful (Diode Editions, 2019) and the 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 May 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. In 2018, KC founded the collaborative poetry project QUEENSBOUND, which will launch its fourth edition in 2024, featuring 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 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 the recipient of an Academy of American Poets Prize, an Editor’s Prize from CRAFT Literary, and a Fugue Poetry Prize. 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, RadioLab, as well as in the anthologies Resist Much, Obey Little; All We Can Hold; Bared; and Who Will Speak for America? Her essays have appeared in VIDA Review, LitHub, and in the anthology Oh, Baby! True Stories About Conception, Adoption, Surrogacy, Pregnancy, Labor, and Love (Creative Nonfiction, 2015). 

Her work has been recognized and supported by Flushing Town Hall, the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Onassis Foundation USA, the Sustainable Arts Foundation, City Artist Corps, the Queens Council on the Arts, the Queens Museum, Works on Water, 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.

KC 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.