Kathryn Kysar is the author of two books of poetry, Dark Lake and Pretend the World, and she edited the anthology Riding Shotgun:  Women Write About Their Mothers.  She has received fellowships and residencies from the Anderson Center for Interdisciplinary Studies, Banfill-Locke Center for the Arts, the Minnesota State Arts Board, the National Endowment for the Humanities, Tofte Lake Center, the Oberholtzer Foundation, and Write On, Door County, and she is the 2025 winner of the Association of Writers and Writing Program’s George Garrett Award for Outstanding Community Service to Literature.  Her poems, book reviews, travel articles, and essays have been published in the About Place Journal, The Fourth River, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Literary Mama, The Minneapolis Star Tribune, Minnesota Women’s Press, Mizna, Mollyhouse, Slag Glass City, Stone Coast Review, Voice Mail Poems, and many other magazines and anthologies.  She has an BA in English and Anthropology from Hamline University and an MFA in Creative Writing from Wichita State University.  She is the founder of the creative writing program at Anoka-Ramsey Community College, and she has served on the boards of directors for the Association of Writers and Writing Programs and Rain Taxi. Kysar teaches at the Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis and performs with the Sonoglyph Collective, a poetry/improvisational jazz group.