Bio
Katelyn Delvaux's poetry has appeared in such publications as formercactus, Split Lip, Menacing Hedge, and Slice. She currently lives in St. Louis, Missouri where she teaches creative writing. Katelyn's poems have received multiple nominations for Best of the Net and Pushcart prizes, while her scholarly work has earned her fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Poetry Foundation.
Katelyn grew up a military brat with shallow roots, perpetually the new kid. Before landing in academia, she was an EKG technician, massage therapist, and even a blackjack dealer. Her interests are just as varied as her professions, including board games, bingo, urban legends, folk lore, moral psychology, refinishing furniture, and all things pop culture.
“To me, poetry is always the most direct way to take the pulse of a time, place and culture,” she said. “If you want to know what’s bothering the populace, look at what the poets are focused on.”
But does poetry really need its own national month? Delvaux says yes, because “in the United States, poetry tends to live in fiction’s cold shadow.”
I call it my spark book—anything that sparks my interest goes in there. It’s sort of an external hard drive for my brain; it houses these thoughts so my mind has the freedom to roam and mull things over, then when it feels like a common thread is being drawn between two or more items from the spark book, I open a document on my computer (actual laptop, not metaphorical brain), copy down the embers/sparks, and get to work.
Winners Selected for MetroLines Poetry Contest
"Delvaux hones her students’ critical thinking and writing skills with a mix of esoteric references and popular culture. She’s not afraid to fuse the 18th-century French artist Joseph Ducreux with memes and rap lyrics or analyze James Oppenheim’s union song “Bread and Roses” while referencing “Orange is the New Black.” As a result of her enthusiasm and efforts in the classroom, Delvaux has been awarded a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Institute Fellowship"
"I’m sure my cohorts are tired of reading this from me in comments on submissions, but Rivet should be electrifying. It should be a jolt, a shot, all those things terrible gum commercials promise but never deliver. Each submission should give you a little shiver."
"Too often we flip through a journal and dog ear the poems we like, scoff at the ones we don’t, but how often do you stop and think of the life and experience that gave way to that particular piece of writing? Not just the authors, but the staff that saw themselves in those words. Working on mojo for the last three years has left me with a stronger sense of the people involved in this process, and now I can’t help but see faces on pages."