Questionnaire 5: Kathy Fagan

Kathy Fagan

Name

Kathy Fagan (she/her)

What was your experience navigating academia? What factors impacted your journey?

I entered academia because I liked learning and reading, wrongly assuming that was where I’d find like minds. And I did find a few, but I also found what one finds in all professions: cliques, hierarchies, biases, and bullying. My working-class background, my creative (vs scholarly) priorities, and my gender and sexuality put me at a distinct disadvantage in the academic world.

I went up for tenure in the mid-90s and promotion just around 2000. Perhaps things have changed; I hope so. I don’t regret my choice because I love teaching, and my salary, low as it was compared to male counterparts, supported my writing habit.

What advice do you have? What do you wish you knew?

I wish I had been more strategically courageous. I wish I’d had a woman 1st-gen mentor. One must find a way, I think, to advocate for oneself without becoming the colleague who sucks all the air out of a room. Understand and respect difference among your colleagues, just as you do your students.

Has being a first-gen student or a student with cultural class boundaries led to any

advantages to your journey and/or your art?

Oh, it has not helped any more in the art world than it did in academia; however, it is the reason I make art, it is who I am and why I am the teacher and poet I’ve become.

Can you share an anecdote of a time when you especially felt your background impacted

your experience in academia?

Once I was on a job interview—this is around 1990–and the chair asked me what my parents did for a living. I literally could not speak, could not form a reply. Of course, the question was entirely inappropriate as well as irrelevant, but I didn’t have the emotional tools to deal with its impact on me in the moment. That kind of thing, and worse, happened all the time in my early years as a professor.

How would you like to see creative writing culture change?

I would so love to see more of the kind of solidarity that you’re building here. First gens supporting one another, women supporting one another, poets supporting one another. If we don’t do it, no one will.

Your own publications or projects you'd like to share

My 7th collection, The Unbecoming, comes out this September with W.W. Norton and is available for preorder now.

Other writers/artists you'd like to highlight

I have just “discovered” C.S. Giscombe, a stunningly good poet.

Bio

Kathy Fagan’s newest collection is The Unbecoming (W.W. Norton, September 2026). Her sixth book, winner of Poetry Society of America’s William Carlos Williams Poetry Prize, is Bad Hobby (Milkweed Editions, 2022), available in print and audio. Sycamore (Milkweed, 2017) was a finalist for the 2018 Kingsley Tufts Award. A 2023 Guggenheim Fellow and former NEA recipient, her first book won The National Poetry Series in 1984. Fagan is Professor Emerita of The Ohio State University, where she co-founded and directed the MFA Program in Creative Writing while co-editing The Journal and its poetry book prize for OSU Press.

Identify as a first-gen (student/and or American) or as a writer exploring class and academic access? Interested in taking the questionnaire? We especially welcome first-gen BIPOC writers to share their perspectives. Contact us on our website for more information.