Photo: M. Sushoreba

​About Catherine 

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My prose, poetry, and songs elevate the uncommon ordinary
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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 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’s writing 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.

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. Catherine is the current Poet Protector of Faville Grove Sanctuary.

Rooted in farm life, Catherine lives with her family in Wisconsin where she holds concern for water.

I am fascinated with how place shapes us.

I am in love with meandering streams, 
and deeply believe in the use of story and art 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! 
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Listen to recordings of published writings through the Podcasts page 
and sample writings linked through the Prose & Poetry page.
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