The author of four previous full-length collections, Catherine Wagner was born in Myanmar (then Burma) during the Vietnam War to American military parents, afterwards living in the Philippines, Indonesia, Yemen, and India before moving to the US. She is professor of creative writing at Miami University, where she is a university labor organizer and founding member of the Environmental Humanities Research Collaborative. Wagner holds a PhD in English: Creative Writing from the University of Utah and an MFA from the University of Iowa Writers Workshop. Her poems appear in the Norton Anthology of Postmodern American Poetry and Out of Everywhere: Linguistically Innovative Poetry by Women in North America and the UK, among other anthologies. Her latest books include Nervous Device (City Lights, 2012) and My New Job (Fence, 2009). Her writing on academic labor has appeared in Poetry and Work: Work in Modern and Contemporary Anglophone Poetry (Palgrave, 2019), Toward.Some.Air: Remarks on Poetics (Banff Centre Press, 2015), World Social and Economic Review of Contemporary Policy Issues (2017), Poetic Labor Project, and elsewhere. Recent poems appear in Poetry, Brooklyn Rail, Lana Turner, Chicago Review and other journals. She currently occupies a rectangular urban plot in a riverine valley, site of the still-embattled abolitionist/anti-abolitionist city Cincinnati, Ohio. From a blockhouse nearby, the first US Army marched north in the 1790s to battle the Miami-Shawnee coalition in a war that made heritable private property in the Ohio Valley safe for invading settler-colonizers and served as a template for ongoing continental and intercontinental genocide and ecocide. Although at present she continues to pay down her mortgage, she seeks to unsettle herself, her neighbors, her son and her cat.
