Katie's second book of poetry, Mouths Open to Name Her, is now available from LSU Press. It was selected by former Louisiana Poet Laureate Ava Leavell-Haymon as part of the Barataria Poetry Series and is described by critic Ann Fisher-Wirth as “wrenching and beautiful.” Katie's debut collection, The Belle Mar (Pleiades 2015), won the Lena-Miles Wever Todd Prize.
Katie is the recipient of The New Millenium Poetry Prize, The Lena-Miles Wever Todd Prize from Pleaides Press, The Missouri Review Editor's Prize, an NEA state fellowship, and an SLS fellowship. Her poems have appeared in New Millenium, Rattle, Frontier, Radar, The New Guard, Southern Quarterly, Prairie Schooner, VerseDaily, Pleiades, The Missouri Review, Deep South Magazine, and elsewhere.
Alicia Ostriker describes Katie's poems as "quietly urgent." Mostly documentary in style and spare in tone and imagery, the poems center story and character most often.
Katie teaches creative writing at Bossier Parish Community College in Bossier City, Louisiana. She lives in Shreveport with her husband, son, and their oddly-shaped shelter dogs in a very old house, and despite having an office, writes most of her poetry in bed.
“Anne Sexton, Sharon Olds, Katie Bickham: three generations related by poetic temperament, which runs thicker than blood. All three write with raw honesty about women’s embodied lives, but only Bickham - equally skilled at lyric and narrative - pushes the boundaries of her range beyond the self to the world.”