Several times a month we connect with our contributors showing where they have been, where they are now, and what’s up for the future.
Name: KT Herr
Title of Pieces Published in Sweet: “Improv”
Issue: 13.1
KT is in their fourth year of doctoral study at the University of Houston, where they are an Inprint C. Glenn Cambor fellow in critical poetics, as well as graduate coordinator for the Creative Writing Program. You can find out more about KT on their website.
Find Them:
Instagram
What are some major accomplishments you have had since your Sweet publication?
I was just notified that I’ve been awarded an Environmental and Social Justice Fellowship from the Vermont Studio Center for May-June 2025! In addition, I was selected by Denise Duhamel to win the 2024 American Literary Review Poetry Contest, and was fortunate to be in attendance at the 2024 Bread Loaf Writers Conference. I also got married, and now I’m a stepparent to the coolest nine-year-old I’ve ever met!
Can you tell us about a current/ongoing project that you’re excited about?
When I can steal a little downtime from my studies, I’ve been experimenting with collage, erasure, visual poetics, and sound/video poems; I’m excited to find ways poetry can live in the world outside of print on a page. I have one series of poems overlaid on childhood photos I’m calling “home studies”–four of them are forthcoming in the next issue of Grist.
Who is your favorite author?
I don’t have a favorite, more like a coterie of delightful geniuses whose names I couldn’t hope to reproduce faithfully here.
What is your favorite poem/essay/book?
Again, I couldn’t possibly pick a favorite. But a few I return to are Audre Lorde’s “Poetry is Not a Luxury,” Cathy Park Hong’s “Delusions of Whiteness in the Avant Garde” and Gregory Orr’s essay on the four poetic temperaments.
What inspires you to write?
My beautiful, fantastically brilliant friends, a few of whom I’m reading right now.
What are you reading right now?
I’m reading Rainbow Rainbow, a collection of short stories by Lydi Conklin, and a few poetry collections: Mistaking the Sea for Green Fields by Ashley Capps; Beforelight by Matthew Gellman; Fishwife by Alysse Kathleen McCanna; and Lost, Hurt, or In Transit Beautiful by Rohan Chhetri.
What is your favorite sweet?
My grandma’s rum cake… except, it’s not my grandma’s! For years I thought it was a secret, fancy recipe… turns out it was just vanilla pudding, yellow cake mix, and a shit ton of rum syrup! I’ve since learned I’m not the only one whose grandma was passing off Duncan Hines as some sort of family delicacy. All the better–I can whip up a quick one when I miss her, and I can even acquire all the ingredients in gluten-free form, so my spouse (pictured with me in the photo below, on a recent weekend trip to San Antonio) can have some. A win-win.
Don’t laugh, but my mom claim’s it as hers as well!
Thank you, KT, for taking the time to reconnect with us again! Congratuatations on the fellowship this spring. We look forward to seeing more of your work in the future!
Are you a contributor who wants to be a part of Sweet Connections? Come fill out our form!
