Kristin Prevallet is a poet, essayist, performer, educator, and change worker whose literary focus is to integrate political and personal consciousness into radical poetic forms. Here’s a recent interview with Dan Godston in the Examiner. Recent recordings and performances are available on PennSound.
Kristin was born in southwest Denver, CO. She is daughter of Annie Prevallet (feminist, teacher and Sister of Loretto) and Donald Schmitz (Littleton high school philosophy and psychology teacher). Her ancestry lies in Franche-Comte (Levier) France. Early studies in alchemy, mythology, and surrealism; recent studies in ecology, performance art, integrative hypnosis. Early education: Bluebirds (girl scouts), outward bound, Catholic Worker. Official education: studied journalism at the University of Northern Colorado; French literature at the Sorbonne; B.A. English at the University of Colorado, Boulder; M.A. Poetics and Media Study at the University of Buffalo.
She is the author of five books including most recently her re-envision of T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, Everywhere Here and in Brooklyn, published by the Belladonna Collaborative, designed by H.R. Hegnauer, and set to music by Colette Alexander. Other books include I, Afterlife: Essay in Mourning Time, an experimental elegy designed by poet Jeff Clarke and published by Essay Press in 2007; Shadow Evidence Intelligence, a book of conceptual confrontations with the form/content rift that occurred during the Bush II years, published by Factory School in 2008; Scratch Sides: Poetry, Documentation and Image-Text Projects, a book of form/content experiments written and designed in Quark and published by Skanky Possum in 1998. She is the editor of A Helen Adam Reader (National Poetry Foundation).
Recent poetic documents that blend conceptual and collaborative forms have appeared in VLAK: Poetics and the Arts; VIZ Inter-Arts; Rhythm of Structure: Mathematics, Art, and Poetic Reflections and the anthology I’ll Drown My Book: Conceptual Writing by Women. A short story based on horror writer Robert Chambers’ The King In Yellow appears in the anthology A Season in Carcosa edited by Joseph Pulver.
A member of the Belladonna Collaborative, she works as a hypnotherapist in Manhattan. Her self-help book You, Resourceful: Return To Who You Want To Be features creative healing strategies.
She has taught poetry and poetics, critical thinking and textual analysis at NYU, Eugene Lang College, Pratt Institute, Bard College, Naropa University’s online MFA program, and the Institute for Writing Studies at St. John’s University. She has received grants from the New York State Council on the Arts, the Mellon Foundation, the New York Foundation for the Arts and the PEN translation fund.