Windthrow: a forestry term for the uprooting or breaking of trees by wind. The voices of K. A. Hays third volume of poetry speak out of nature s violent transformations. At turns self-effacing and empathic, fearful and accepting, these are poems of heat: the heat of new motherhood, of uncertainty, and of grief. Here, the things of a teeming world the truck stacked with cut trees, the military jet, droning over, and the beachgrass, blown / with dusty miller sprout are bound for renewal and ruin. In poems spare and strange, Hays looks outward to lay bare the complexities of our emotional lives."
K. A. (Katie) Hays is the author of four books of poems from Carnegie Mellon University Press. Her poems have appeared in Best American Poetry (2009, 2011), Best New Poets, and many other anthologies and magazines, including The Southern Review, American Poetry Review, and Gray's Sporting Journal. She is also a fiction writer whose work has appeared in more than a dozen magazines, and is currently at work on a manuscript for younger readers. Hays studied literature at Bucknell and Oxford universities, and earned an M.F.A. in the Literary Arts (fiction) from Brown University in 2005. A 2018 Fellow at Vermont Studio Center, and 2011 Poet-in-Residence at the Robert Frost Place in Franconia, New Hampshire, Hays teaches creative writing at Bucknell. She lives with her family in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania.