Kara van de Graaf is a poet, teacher, and editor living in Salt Lake City, Utah. She holds a Ph.D. in Creative Writing from University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, where she was a Chancellor’s Fellow and a Distinguished Dissertation Fellow, an MFA in Writing from University of Pittsburgh, where she was a K. Leroy Irvis Fellow, and a BA in English from Purdue University. Currently, she serves as Assistant Professor of English at Utah Valley University.

Her first collection of poems, Spitting Image, won the Crab Orchard First Book Prize in Poetry and is available from SIU Press. Individual poems appear widely in national literary journals, including The Southern Review, AGNI, New England Review, Gettysburg Review, The Adroit Journal, and the anthology Best New Poets.  She was a Tennessee Williams Scholar at Sewanee Writer’s Conference and a fellow at Vermont Studio Center, among other honors.

A former poetry editor for Cream City Review, she is currently an editor for Lightbox Poetry, an online educational resource for poetry in the classroom, which she co-founded in 2015 with the poet Richie Hofmann.