Poet Laureate 2014

KRISTINA MORICONI 

 

Kristina Moriconi is a poet and essayist. She is the author of the chapbook, No Such Place (Finishing Line Press, 2013), and her work has appeared most recently in Blood Lotus, Under the Sun, and Crab Creek Review. She is the 2014 Montgomery County, Pennsylvania Poet Laureate and has been nominated three times for a Pushcart Prize. She earned her MFA from the Rainier Writing Workshop in Tacoma, Washington and lives and teaches now in suburban Philadelphia.

 

“In the haunting poems of Kristina Moriconi, those common objects—paring knives, floating leaves, the tangle of hair in a drain—and map-quest locations—South Komodo, Hunters Lane, Coopers Rock—that seem to anchor the known world become markers of absence and loss. With lyric immediacy and quiet, yet uncanny images, the poet contemplates the mysteries of what can’t be resolved—dementia, bodily trauma, the death of parents, love that constricts—as a way to imagine how to “learn to live without….” These poems are thin places, locations where the visible and invisible worlds open into each other, where certainty erodes and possibility emerges from letting go.”

J.C. Todd

2014 Celebrity Judge