Catherine Chandler

Career

Chandler's work has appeared in numerous print and online journals and anthologies, including Able Muse, Alabama Literary Review, American Arts Quarterly, The Centrifugal Eye, Comstock Review, First Things, Iambs and Trochees, Light Quarterly, The Lyric, Measure, Möbius, Orbis, Quadrant, The Raintown Review, Texas Poetry Journal and many others. She is the author of Lines of Flight (Able Muse Press, 2011), a highly acclaimed full-length collection of poetry in various forms, including the sonnet, pantoum, rondeau (poetry), villanelle, triolet, sapphic stanza, ballad stanza, quatrain, cinquain, cento (poetry) and other forms. Her second book, Glad and Sorry Seasons was published in the Spring of 2014 by Biblioasis Press of Windsor, Ontario, and her third full-length collection, "The Frangible Hour", winner of the Richard Wilbur Award, was published by the University of Evansville Press at the end of December 2016. She is also the author of three chapbooks, For No Good Reason, All or Nothing, and This Sweet Order (White Violet Press/Kelsay Books), and is co-editor of Passages (The Greenwood Centre for Living History, 2010).

Chandler has lectured in Spanish at McGill University’s Department of Languages and Translation for many years and also acted as the university's International Affairs Officer. She also taught Spanish at Concordia University in Montreal, and has taught music, French and English for the Commission scolaire des Trois-Lacs in the Vaudreuil-Soulanges region of Quebec. She has lived in Canada since 1972, holds dual United States and Canadian citizenship, and currently resides in Saint-Lazare, Quebec.

Awards

Chandler is the recipient of the 2016 Richard Wilbur Award for her book The Frangible Hour, University of Evansville Press. She also won the 2010 Howard Nemerov Sonnet Award for her poem "Coming to Terms", the final judge being A.E. Stallings. She was also a finalist for the Nemerov award in 2008 ("Missing"), 2009 ("Singularities"), 2012 ("Composure"), 2013 ("The Watchers at Punta Ballena, Uruguay"), 2014 ("Afterwords"), and 2015 ("Oleka"), and won The Lyric Quarterly Prize in 2004 ("Franconia") and the Leslie Mellichamp Award in 2015 ("Chiaroscuro"). Six of her poems, including “66”, “Body of Evidence” and “Writ” received Pushcart Prize nominations, and her poem, “66” was a finalist for the Best of the Net award in 2006. Her poem, "Discovery" was a finalist in the Able Muse Write Prize (Poetry) and her Millay parody, "Pack Rat" was a finalist in the 2015 X.J. Kennedy Parody Award. Her first full-length collection, Lines of Flight (Able Muse Press, 2011), was shortlisted for the Poets' Prize in 2013.

She has received numerous endorsements for her work, including praise from Richard Wilbur, who wrote that Chandler's poems "offer the reader a plain eloquence, a keen eye, and a graceful development of thought"; Rhina Espaillat, who praised Chandler's "effortless mastery of form"; Eric Ormsby, who called Chandler's poems "distillations of experience captured in exquisite measures"; and X. J. Kennedy, who named her "an engaging and authoritative new voice". James Matthew Wilson, in his essay, "Intelligent Design: The Poetry of Catherine Chandler", states: "Chandler stands out for both her particular elegance and fluency of style and for the profundity of her vision."

Catherine Chandler's poetry blog, The Wonderful Boat, is online at cathychandler.blogspot.com.

Works

Collections