Biography
Kristin Prevallet is a poet, essayist, performer, hypnotherapist, and educator 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 and with Geoffrey Watterman in Tinge Magazine.
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. She is the partial owner of Buckskin Joe’s mine in Alma, CO; 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 now lives in Brooklyn. Has taught poetry and poetics, critical thinking and textual analysis at NYU, The New School, St. John’s University, Bard College, and Naropa University’s online MFA program. She has received grants from the New York State Council on the Arts, the Mellon Foundation, a 2007 New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship in Poetry and a 2004 PEN translation fund award.
Kristin’s teachers include Ed and Jenny Dorn, Stan Brakhage, and Lorna Dee Cervantes at the University of Colorado, Boulder; Anne Waldman at Naropa University; Bernadette Mayer at St. Mark’s Poetry Project; Joan Retallack, Charles Bernstein, Robert Creeley, and Susan Howe at the University of Buffalo. For her masters thesis at the University of Buffalo, she worked with Mike Basinski and Robert Bertholf in the Poetry / Rare Books Collection cataloguing the archive of Helen Adam. The fruits of this labor, A Helen Adam Reader, was published by The National Poetry Foundation in 2007. She is a certified hypnotherapist and is completing a book of essays called “Writing is Never by Itself Alone: Practicing Investigative Poetics.”