Katie Peterson is the author of Fog and Smoke, published by FSG in January 2024. Her previous book, Life in a Field (2021) is a collaboration with the photographer Young Suh. She is the author of four other books of poetry: This One Tree (New Issues, 2006), Permission (New Issues, 2013), The Accounts (University of Chicago, 2013), and A Piece of Good News (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2019). Her work has been translated into French, Korean, and Portuguese, and a Selected Poems in
French (translated by Aude Pivin), with an introduction by Louise Gluck, will be published by Cheyne Editeur in 2024. Peterson’s lyric poems explore interior and exterior landscapes, exposure, and shelter. “A poem is a place,” Peterson stated in an interview with the Harvard Gazette. “It does not describe a place.” In her artist’s statement, Peterson explains, “I like a poem that feels logical but is not—a poem in which thinking takes the shape of a hallucination. I like a poem in which all of my
intelligence fails. I am forced to use other tools: desire, anger, recklessness. I pursue beauty and
memory not to preserve them but to try, against odds, to preserve that perishable pursuit.” Peterson
teaches at UC Davis. She lives in California with her family. Deer frequent her yard.
