Residency Artist - Creative Writing

Katie Daley

Email: katiedaley@roadrunner.com
Website: www.katiedaley.com

As a poet and performer, I take great pleasure in the both the creation and enactment of the poems I write. I also take great pleasure in infecting students of all ages -- from pre-schoolers to senior citizens -- with this passion for creating word music. At residencies in schools and community centers, I relish disproving students' enthusiastic declarations that they "hate to write" by showing them how the process of writing poems immerses them in the things they love -- ideas, dreams, music, adventure, exploration and expression. Once they've experienced the thrill -- as well as the elbow grease -- of hotwiring their minds to the powerful engines of their imaginations, they become much friendlier towards their pens and their blank sheets of paper. It's my hope and belief that this playful immersion in the musicality of words, figurative language, comparing, contrasting, and articulating ideas with imagery (essential elements of the Language Arts Academic Content Standards) sets them at greater ease with all kinds of writing -- even the school kind. To emphasize and celebrate the relevancy of writing, my residencies also focus on broadcasting students' work on stages, community radio stations, school P.A. systems, shop windows, local newspapers and/or self-published books.

I've recently finished my second manuscript of poems, am working out the kinks in two one-woman plays I've written, and am deep in the first draft of a memoir about hitchhiking, fruit-picking and busking my way across America and Europe. Fascinated by how the personal and political realms mirror each other, my working focus of late has been to explore and penetrate this intersection. In this effort, I am often naturally drawn to write (and perform) in the voices of various characters from around the world. Crafting these explorations into pieces that are both subtle and powerful has proved to be enormously challenging; I am grateful for the many lessons involved and hopeful that they eventually bear edible, potent fruit.

I've been writing since I was 12 years old and performing my work publicly since I was 17. My teachers have been books, songs, street musicians, travel, hearing the lilt of other languages, countless live poetry jamborees, fellow poets, professors, and growing up in a family of mimics and storytellers. I earned a B.A. in English/Creative Writing from Cleveland State University and an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Western Michigan University. In the past few years, I have received two individual creativity grants from the Ohio Arts Council, a fellowship at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts, and commissions for philanthropic and business organizations. An accomplishment of which I am exceptionally proud is troubadoring my one-woman show of poetic monologues throughout the U.S. and Canada.