Artist, Teaching Artist
Literary
Contact: Karen Weyant
Phone: (716) 720-2400
Address:
410 East Street
Warren, PA 16365
Born and raised in rural Pennsylvania, Karen Weyant now makes her home in Warren, Pennsylvania. She is an Associate Professor of English at Jamestown Community College where she teaches a variety of classes.
She primarily writes poems and essays and is the author of two poetry chapbooks, Stealing Dust (Finishing Line Press) and Wearing Heels in the Rust Belt (Main Street Rag). Her poems have been published in over 100 journals including Chautauqua, Copper Nickel. Crab Orchard Review, Harpur Palate, Fourth River, Flyway, Spillway, Rattle, River Styx and Whiskey Island. Her poetry has also appeared in Ted Kooser's American Life in Poetry series and Sundress Publications Best of the Net annual anthology.
Her essays have appeared in Barren Magazine, Briar Cliff Review, cream city review, Lake Effect, Potomac Review, Storm Cellar, and Waccamaw. "Compromising Chiroptophobia or Why I'm Giving Up and Learning to Love the Bat," which explores her fear of bats while juxtoposing her concerns over the bat crisis in my home state won Nassau Review's 2014 Writer Award for Prose.
She has also been honored with a New York Foundation for the Arts poetry fellowship and the SUNY Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Scholarship and Creative Activities. Her primary writing, teaching, and research interests include working-class literature and education as well as environmental and nature issues.
When she is not teaching, reading, or writing, she is biking or hiking through the woods of Western New York and Northern Pennsylvania.