Biography

Katie Mihalek is a PhD Student and Teaching Assistant in the Department of English at the University of Rhode Island. Her research and creative work includes poetics, form, ecocriticism, gender and sexuality studies, human/environment connections, literature of the body, and creative interventions into scientific writing and communications. She is the Managing Editor of URI’s literary journal Ocean State Review, and a co-founder and Poetry Editor of the independent small press Fork Apple Press. She has received support from the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop and the Southampton Writers Conference, and was the 2024-25 Community Engagement Fellow for Mass Poetry. Her work can be found in Frontier, TIMBER, Sheila-Na-Gig, Barnstorm, and others.

She holds an MFA from Emerson College in Creative Writing, where she taught rhetoric and composition and served as the Editor-in-Chief of Redivider. Inspired by human anatomy exhibits and plastination slices in the medical field, her thesis, Hand/Print, expanded on the concrete and contrapuntal poetic forms, creating poems through and within the shape of cross-sectional slices of her two hands to weave themes of grief, reproductive health, body, and heritage. She also holds an M.S. in Medical Sciences from Boston University, where she studied environmental stressors on chronic kidney disease, and a B.S. in Biology with an English minor from Tufts University. Outside of URI, she is an avid hiker and competitive ballroom dancer.

Courses Taught:

ENG 243: The Short Story