Six Questions for Katherine Riegel - 2026 Poetry Contest Judge
- May 1
- 4 min read
Katherine Riegel is the author of the poetry books What Life Is Like Here on Earth (Sheila-na-Gig Editions, 2026), Love Songs from the End of the World (Main Street Rag Press, 2019), What the Mouth Was Made For (FutureCycle Press, 2013), Castaway (FutureCycle Press, 2010), and a lyric memoir, Our Bodies Are Mostly Water (Cornerstone Press, 2025). Her prose poetry chapbook Letters to Colin Firth won the Sundress Press chapbook competition in 2015. Her work has appeared in Brevity, Cream City Review, The Gettysburg Review, The Offing, One, Orion, Poets.org, SWWIM, Tin House, and many other literary publications. After receiving an MFA in poetry from the Iowa Writers Workshop, she taught writing at various colleges and universities for 25 years, most recently the University of South Florida. She is co-founder and managing editor of the literary magazine Sweet (sweetlit.org) and teaches independent online classes in poetry and creative nonfiction.
Find her at katherineriegel.com and in the Scottish Borders, just one mile north of England, where she, her husband, a senior Golden Retriever, two cats, and sometimes her stepdaughter (plus partner and younger, easily bored Golden Retriever) live in a small 200-year-old house with views of hills and sheep fields. Having only moved from the US in summer 2025, she is not yet bored of the scenery, though January is definitely a month to go somewhere it doesn’t rain all day every day.
INTERVIEW
MG: What is your approach to writing poetry?
KR: I have to get some kind of complete draft down the first time; if I don’t, I can never return to the right space in my mind to finish it. Of course I have dozens of scribbled lines that never get used, but I guess that’s just my practice. I think writing regularly helps me the way practicing piano or tennis helps their practitioners, reinforcing the grooves in my mind that lead towards metaphor, fresh wording, and (hopefully) insight.
Once I do have that first draft, something that actually goes somewhere, I fiddle with it for a few weeks before I decide I’m done with it—cutting a line here, changing a word there, rearranging line and stanza breaks.
MG: Who are some of your favourite poets and why?
KR: Such a difficult question! Some favourites:
Jane Hirshfield, because her work closely observes the world and then turns the meaning of what she observes sideways from anything you expect;
Ada Limon, because she’s so, so honest about loss and hurt and love that it makes me want to be honest, too;
Dorianne Laux, because her imagination seems unlimited, and her metaphors transform events into something beautiful, even if it’s temporary;
Ross Gay, because his seemingly loose, meandering style always finds its way to insight and often joy, and when it does, he knows to keep a light touch and avoid explanation.
Truthfully, I’m more of a mixtape poetry reader, with many, many individual poems I love by a huge variety of poets, old and new. What they have in common is that something’s at stake and they help me see the world afresh.
MG: What is one of your favourite poems? What do you love about it?
KR: “You Are Who I Love” by Aracelis Girmay. It’s a list poem—a form I am often drawn to for how it accrues meaning more exponentially than you expect—and the wording and form of the list items varies and returns as you read, like a chant. The generosity of the length allows the generosity of acknowledgment: how we live and what we do in the face of horrors like climate change, racism, and the rise of fascism. And I’m a sucker for a powerful ending, which this has, bringing together rage, tenderness, and love as one.
MG: What is the best writing or poetry-related advice you’ve ever received?
KR: In graduate school, I thought I had writer’s block (we all tend to feel that affliction at some point) and my professor, James Galvin, suggested a seemingly simple prompt: What’s eating you? And what do you believe in? I think almost all poems answer those two questions, and yes, I do still go back to them when I feel stuck.
MG: Tell us about your lyric memoir: Our Bodies Are Mostly Water (Cornerstone Press, 2025).
KR: My sister died in 2019. From when her cancer was diagnosed to when she died nine months later to years afterwards, I could write about nothing but her. I believe that, if you’re a writer, you process the world through words. So I wrote fragments and prose poems and flash memoir, until a comment from a writer friend allowed me to stitch those together like a collage. I think Western culture doesn’t really “do” grief, so I hope others might feel inspired to make art about their own after reading my book.
MG: What is your next writing, poetry, or career-related goal?
KR: Between being mostly Buddhist, having published poetry for 35 years, and living with ME/CFS, I don’t really have goals as such. However, I hope to continue offering my asynchronous online classes for writers of poetry and flash creative nonfiction, because nurturing and helping to shape others’ writing makes me feel both useful and hopeful. One of the writers I’ve worked with in those classes for years has asked me to do a poetry writing book for beginners, so that may be the next project—with poems, as always, popping up when they will.
Katherine Riegel will judge the 2026 MoonLit Getaway Poetry Contest.
