KT Herr (they/she) is a queer writer, musician, educator, and curious person from Lancaster, Pennsylvania. They hold a BA in English Language & Literature from Smith College and an MFA in Creative Writing from Sarah Lawrence College, where they were selected to receive the 2019 Thomas Lux Award.

In various past lives, KT has worked as a waiter, a bartender, a restaurant manager, and as a door-to-door canvasser for public media. More recently, KT was a coordinator for the Sarah Lawrence Right-to-Write Program, co-director of the Sarah Lawrence Poetry Festival, and an editorial intern with Black Lawrence Press. They have taught classes and community workshops with Milk Press, the Marin Poetry Center, and the West Tisbury Public Library, as well as guest-teaching as a visiting writer at SUNY Stony Brook, UT Knoxville, and the University of Houston. KT is former poetry editor of The 3288 Review and current online poetry editor at Gulf Coast.

KT’s poems have been selected as finalists in the Grist Pro Forma Contest, the Frontier OPEN Prize, and the Palette Poetry Spotlight Award; as semifinalist for the 92Y Discovery Contest; and as winner of the Sweet Poetry Contest and the American Literary Review Award in Poetry. Additionally, their work has appeared or is forthcoming in Foglifter, The Massachusetts Review, Black Warrior Review, and elsewhere. KT has benefited from the creative support of Inprint Houston, the Atlantic Center for the Arts, Great Lakes Experimental Arts, and the 2024 Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference.

KT is a board member with Four Way Books, and an Inprint C. Glenn Cambor PhD Fellow in Critical Poetics at the University of Houston, where they work as Graduate Coordinator of the Creative Writing Program.