Erinn Batykefer
Erinn Batykefer was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania during one of the coldest Januaries on record, and grew up dividing her time between the Northland Public Library, where she worked as a page (read: hid in the stacks and read voraciously, ears pricked for the sound of footsteps and heart pounding at the very thought of getting caught), and the Allegheny River, where she learned to row.
Erinn Batykefer’s first collection, Allegheny, Monongahela, was chosen by Peggy Shumaker as winner of the 2008 Benjamin Saltman Prize at Red Hen Press and hailed as a ‘haunting, sinuous debut’ made of ‘a language at once torrential yet controlled, dark yet luminous’ (Quan Barry). Her work has earned numerous awards, including a Martha Meier Renk Distinguished Poetry Fellowship at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a Stadler Poetry Fellowship at Bucknell University, where she also served as Stadler Associate Editor of West Branch.
Erinn is currently at work on a new collection of poetry that re-imagines Jane Eyre, as well as a memoir she describes as ‘a fractured coming-of-age story about sisterhood, rowing, art, masochism, anorexia and bulimia, American girlhood, love, cruelty, and really great 90s music, among other things.’ She lives in Pennsylvania.
