Katherine (Katie) Riegel

poet, writer, teacher, mentor, editor, Midwesterner

Looking more like my mom every day (I hope).

Interested in my books? You can find them at Amazon or Bookshop.

Forthcoming memoir: Our Bodies Are Mostly Water

I’m thrilled that my lyric memoir about my sister’s life, death, and my grief will be published by Cornerstone Press! A book made of short nonfiction pieces, fragments, prose poems, and dreams, I hope it will speak to and about other types of grief besides sister-grief–how we slip in and out of time when we’re grieving, how we feel we can’t bear it and yet we do, how we create art in the face of loss because that’s how we make meaning of this inevitable human experience. It is slated to come out by summer 2025.

This photo was taken by our sister-friend; we had been giggling so hard we could barely breathe, and yes, we were in public at a frozen custard shop. My sister’s giggle was infectious, and I miss it terribly.

I run both video-call and asynchronous online writing workshops (poetry & short cnf) through Sweet Lit, an online literary magazine I co-founded.

I also work with writers one-on-one to help polish poetry and creative nonfiction for publication, both individual pieces and book-length manuscripts.

My sister at her equine therapy center in central Illinois. That sky is what makes the flatness beautiful.
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Some bits that didn’t make the formal bio:

I dropped out of law school because I was writing poems during Civil Procedure, but I had enjoyed helping other students with their law papers and thought maybe I could teach writing for a living. Iowa wasn’t my first choice for an MFA; I wanted to go to Indiana University so I could hang out with my best friend from college who was there for her MFA in fiction (she’s still my best friend). I loved teaching at all the many colleges and universities where I taught, but the students in Tampa were my favorites in general because they laughed at even my lame jokes. I live in Memphis now, and though I have various problems with the politics and culture of the South, the stray dogs are the worst part. My household includes two golden retrievers, two cats–one of whom I call profane names because he bites my ankles as I try to get his food ready every morning–and an engineer husband who tells dad jokes and hasn’t lost his English accent.