Catherine Bowman

Campus:

IU Bloomington

Catherine Bowman is the author of the poetry collections Can I Finish, Please?, The Plath Cabinet, Notarikon, Rock Farm, and 1-800-Hot-Ribs which was reissued by Carnegie-Mellon University Press as part of their Contemporary Classics Series. She is the editor of Word of Mouth: Poems Featured on NPR’s “All Things Considered,” an anthology of poems by poets she has reviewed, and featured on National Public Radio’s “All Things Considered.” Her poems have appeared in several editions of Best American Poetry as well as many other literary magazines and journals, such as The New Yorker, The Paris Review, TriQuarterly, The Kenyon Review, River Styx, The Los Angeles Times, Ploughshares, Crazyhorse, Sycamore Review, Open City and Conjunctions. Her writing has been awarded the Peregrine Smith Poetry Prize, the Kate Tufts Discovery Award for Poetry, the Dobie Paisano Fellowship, a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry, and Yaddo artist residencies. She has served as director of the MFA Creative Writing Program and held The Ruth Lilly Professor in Poetry. She is the recipient of the 2020 Tracy M. Sonneborn Award. She received the Provost Professor award and was named Provost Professor in 2020.

Professor Bowman's book project, Volver, Volver (An Underworld Pilgrimage), is an imaginative exploration of her matrilineal lineage and heritage, tracing her family's roots from Mexico, Ireland, Spain, and Texas. This recovery project aims to intertwine historical research with poems and storytelling, focusing on the lives of Bowman's female ancestors going back to 18th century San Antonio and Mexico. As very little documentation exists, the project is an imaginative inquiry into the lives of her ancestors. In chronicling a personal story, Bowman hopes to speak to wider questions such as immigration and migration, borderlands, memory, women’s work, and concepts of identity, nation and history. Through imagined underworld encounters that mirror the overworld, she will blend mythic, invented and historical narratives, using various poetic forms and historical documents to create a memoir and history in poems and stories. This project is a polyphonic exploration of individual and collective histories, particularly focusing on the borderlands of Northern Mexico and South Texas. The project seeks to balance intergenerational trauma with legacies of love and resilience, ultimately aiming for generational healing and a deeper understanding of women’s lives in these border regions, past and present.