Kathy Lou Schultz
Poetry
Memphis, TN
Poet-scholar Dr. Kathy Lou Schultz is the author of two scholarly monographs, Introduction to Claudia Rankine (Lake Forest College/Northwestern UP) and The Afro-Modernist Epic and Literary History: Tolson, Hughes, Baraka (Palgrave), and four collections of poetry and experimental prose, including Biting Midge: Works in Prose (Belladonna) and Some Vague Wife (Atelos Press). Her first collection of poems, Re dress, was chosen by Pulitzer Prize-winner Forrest Gander for the Michael Rubin Award from San Francisco State University. Her poetry is published widely in journals and anthologies including Bombay Gin, Cleaver Magazine, Fence Magazine, Hambone, Miracle Monocle, New American Writing, P Queue Literary Journal, Touch the Donkey, and Efforts and Affections: Women Poets on Mentorship (U of Iowa P). She also performs her work, “Trio,” on the album, The Colored Waiting Room, by Dr. Guy’s MusiQologY. Audio and video recordings of Schultz performing her work are available at PennSound: https://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Schultz-K.php.
Dr. Schultz is the 2024 winner of the College of Arts and Sciences Distinguished Research Award in the Humanities from the University of Memphis. Her scholarship appears or is forthcoming in highly selective journals, including African American Review, Contemporary Literature, Journal of Modern Literature, Plume Poetry: Essays and Commentary, and Paideuma: Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics. Her scholarly work has also been solicited for high-profile anthologies, including The Cambridge Companion to American Poetry and Politics Since 1900 (Cambridge UP), Rethinking the North American Long Poem: Matter, Form, Experiment (U of New Mexico P), and Some Other Blues: New Perspectives on Amiri Baraka (Ohio State UP).
Dr. Schultz is in demand as a speaker worldwide. She has been invited to speak internationally at the University of Basel, Switzerland; the University of Montreal, Canada; the University of Fribourg, Switzerland; and to present for a Surrealist Women Panel celebrating International Women’s Day for Chez Max et Dorothea (Seillans, France) that was viewed in Africa, North America, and Europe. In the U.S., she has been a plenary speaker at the University of California, Berkeley; the National Poetry at the University of Maine and others.
She is also active in digital humanities. She has been invited to record podcasts at the Kelly Writers House, University of Pennsylvania for the National Poetry Foundation and to write podcasts for Remarkable Receptions, a public-facing humanities project on African American novels sponsored by the Black Literature Network, a joint project from African American literary studies at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville and the History of Black Writing at the University of Kansas funded by the Mellon Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities. https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/remarkable-receptions/id1632223267?i=1000568115508