About Me

My name is Colleen Harris. I was born and raised on Long Island, and have since lived in Kentucky, Georgia, North Carolina and Tennessee. This has done interesting things for my accent. By day I work as a university librarian, by night I'm a doctoral student, writer, procrastinator, reader, and reservoir of various useless information tidbits that come in handy when I make it out to play trivia. I hold enough degrees to prove that I am largely useless outside of academia. My dream job is to be locked away with undergrad and graduate students, teaching the craft/art/dark magic of interesting writing. I am a little too peppermint for gentler souls, and I use semicolons in casual conversation.

The more formal bio? Colleen S. Harris, assistant professor on the library faculty at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, is the author of three books of poetry: The Kentucky Vein: Reflections (Punkin House, 2011), These Terrible Sacraments (Bellowing Ark, 2010) and God in my Throat: The Lilith Poems (Bellowing Ark, 2009), finalist in the 2008 St. Lawrence Book Award. Twice nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Colleen’s work has appeared in Minnetonka Review, Adirondack Review, The Louisville Review, Wisconsin Review, Appalachian Heritage and others. Colleen co-edited the volume Women on Poetry: Writing, Revising, Publishing and Teaching (McFarland, 2012). She holds an MFA in Writing from Spalding University, an MS in Library Science from the University of Kentucky, and Bachelors degrees in Economics and International Relations from Centre College. A native of Bay Shore, New York, she has lived and worked in Kentucky, Georgia, North Carolina, and currently resides in Chattanooga, Tennessee with her basset hound, Otto.

A bit of a longer writeup on the awesome page Punkin House keeps for me!