Discipline: Literature – poetry

Trevor Ketner

Discipline: Literature – poetry
Region: New York, NY
MacDowell Fellowships: 2024

Trevor Ketner is the author of The Wild Hunt Divinations: A Grimoire (Wesleyan University Press, 2023) and [WHITE] (University of Georgia Press, 2021; Broken Sleep Books (UK), 2022) selected as a winner of the National Poetry Series by Forrest Gander.

Their chapbooks include Negative of a Photo of Fire (Seven Kitchens Press, 2019), White Combine: A Portrait of Robert Rauschenberg (The Atlas Review, 2019), and Major Arcana: Minneapolis, winner of the Burnside Review Chapbook Contest judged by Diane Seuss.

They have been published in Poetry, The Academy of American Poets' Poem-a-Day, Poetry Daily, Brooklyn Rail, New England Review, Ninth Letter, Changes, Diagram, Foglifter, and elsewhere. Their essays and reviews can be found in The American Poetry Review, The Kenyon Review, Boston Review, and Lambda Literary.

A 2020 Lambda Literary Fellow, Ketner has been a Poets House Emerging Poets Fellow, Emerge-Surface-Be Fellow for The Poetry Project (selected by Wayne Koestenbaum), and a Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts Fellow. They hold an M.F.A. from the University of Minnesota and live in Manhattan with their husband.

While at MacDowell, Ketner polished two, transgenre, book-length manuscripts-in-progress, the water-moon sequence and The Eulefrau. the water-moon sequence is a 1000-stanza renga project developed via a daily writing practice over the course of three years that will reach completion in November of 2024. The Eulefrau is a speculative memoir about the alternate path Ketner's life might have taken had they moved to New Mexico and started HRT, something they were considering over the course of their pandemic isolation. The Eulefrau uses a system of repetition and chance in alignment with the Tibetan practice of dice divination, called Mo, to determine its form.

Portrait by Cormac Fitzgerald

Studios

Sprague-Smith

Trevor Ketner worked in the Sprague-Smith studio.

In January of 1976, the original Sprague-Smith Studio — built in 1915–1916 and funded by music students of Mrs. Charles Sprague-Smith of the Veltin School — was destroyed by fire. Redesigned by William Gnade, Sr., a Peterborough builder, the fieldstone structure was rebuilt the same year from the foundation up, reusing the original fieldstone. A few…

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