Photo: M. Sushoreba
About Catherine
My prose, poetry, and songs elevate
the uncommon ordinary
and give voice to relationship
between ecology and art.
My prose, poetry, and songs elevate
the uncommon ordinary
and give voice to relationship
between ecology and art.
In everything that I do, in every object I welcome into my life,
I consider three questions in the stream of give-and-take:
Where does it come from? Where is it going? What is my part?
Catherine Young is a disabled writer, ecologist, and songcrafter whose work is infused with a keen sense of place.
She is author of the literary memoir Black Diamonds: A Childhood Colored by Coal (Torrey House Press) and the eco-poetry collection Geosmin (Midwest Book Awards Silver Medal winner).
Her writing has been published in the anthologies A Line Meant, Essential Voices, The Driftless Reader, Contours, Permanent Vacation II: Eighteen Writers on Work and Life in Our National Parks, and Imagination and Place: Cartography and her work appears internationally and nationally in literary journals including Ascent, Minding Nature, Flyway, Fourth River, Literary Mama, Hippocampus, and Midwest Review, among others.
Catherine, a Wisconsin Poet Laureate Finalist, was part of the collaborative poetry video of the American Geophysics Union’s AGU22 Dear Sky, Dear Blue Planet and her poem “Waterways” was commissioned for the seven-state artist collective MidWay Atlas. Her multi-layered musical composition Water, Tree, Heart was published in About Place Journal’s “On Rivers” edition. With her freely-distributed broadside “Invocation” she invites viewers into ekphrasis and protecting land and waters by celebrating place through public art. She was Poet Protector, creating poems for Faville Grove Sanctuary and the Southern Wisconsin Bird Alliance, and she is the 2025 recipient of the Dick Scuglik Residency at Write On Door County.
A nominee for the Pushcart Prize and Best American Essays, Catherine Young worked as a national park ranger, farmer, educator, and mother before completing her MFA in Creative Writing at the University of British Columbia. She holds degrees in Environmental Science, Physical Geography, and Education from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She has worked in ecological restoration and in renewal through story. Catherine leads song and writing workshops and is creator and producer of the radio program and podcast Landward: Readings of Place and Season, currently recording for the Landward Poetry Project.
Rooted in farm life, Catherine lives with her family in Wisconsin where she is totally in love with meandering streams. She deeply believes in the use of story and art as tools for transforming the world.
My work as a naturalist, educator, and folk artist has been filled
with preserving and sharing story.
Like a bountiful harvest of farm produce, stories preserve sustenance. Publishing, performing story, and crafting song is like lifting the preserves from larder shelves and opening them up for a feast.
I invite you to partake!
Listen to recordings of published writings through the Podcasts page
and sample writings linked through the Prose & Poetry page.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
*Would you like to receive my newsletter?*
*Contact me at [email protected] and request to be put on the list.