BIO

Katarina Knehans is an American/Australian writer. She attended the University of Cincinnati, mentored by Kristen Iverson and completed her BA in Creative Writing. 

Her main influences include Kathryn Harrison, David Foster Wallace, Sylvia Plath, Carmen Maria Machado, Gillian Flynn, Peter Carey, Anne Sexton, and Emily Bronte. From these authors she has taken a tactile visual lens to her work, trying to transport the reader/listener to the scene she paints. She thrives writing flash fiction- a challenge to convey a powerful message within a limited amount of words. Through flash fiction writing she found pairing her text to music increased the power her words had by accompanying them with an auditory landscape to flesh them out more fully than text alone could. She studied the Vaccai vocal method from the age of six and having been a singer, takes the physical demands of phrases and vocabulary into account when creating pieces.

While attending UC she founded Rogue Writers, a writing group who, under her leadership, went on to publish a literary journal and a multi-media album with the Society of International Composers. After that she worked closely with composer Nic Bizub, producing Welcome Mat (2018) and Towards Light (2018). In 2019, she worked with composer Douglas Knehans to produce Cloud Ossuary which features her poem Bones and All.Following this collaboration, she was commissioned by Knehans for her short cycle of poems Watching Glass I hear You from which he has created a short song cycle of the same name for a recording project for mezzosoprano and piano (2021).