RK FAUTH

poet.

R. K. Fauth is the author of A Dream in Which I Am Playing with Bees (Texas Tech University Press, 2024), winner of the Walt MacDonald First Book Prize in Poetry, long-listed for the Laurel Prize in Ecopoetry books, and finalist for the Julie Suk Award.

She earned a Master’s degree at Georgetown University where she was a Lannan Poetry Fellow. Her poems have appeared in POETRY Magazine, Poem-a-Day, AGNI Literary Journal, Plumwood Mountain Journal, and elsewhere. Her writing has been anthologized in Dream of the River (Jacar Press, 2021) and Ecobloomspaces (West Trade Review, 2024).

Fauth has received fellowships & awards from the Academy of American Poets, the Fulbright Program, The Oak Spring Garden Foundation, The North Carolina Poetry Society, and The Lannan Center for Poetics and Social Practice. She lives in Asheville, North Carolina.

BOOK:
A Dream in which i am playing with bees

What could disappear from our minds if nature is no longer a mirror? The poems in A Dream in Which I Am Playing with Bees explore the effect of species extinction on language. This collection is made of natural imagery, queer metaphors, personal observations, and historical circumstances surrounding honeybees. In the absence of the bee, Fauth presents these poems as “artifacts” of a bygone world - an ecologically-intact dream.

Hear the Prelude poem, winner of a Treehouse Climate Action Prize from the Academy of American Poets → Listen

Get a copy → Read

Praise for
playing with bees—

“Staggeringly bright”

—Rachel Mennies, author of The Glad Hand of God Points Backwards and The Naomi Letters

“…a poignant meditation on how we imagine both the natural world and our place within it, while also capturing some of the mystery of what exists beyond our ability to express.”

—Dr. Peter Kalmas, author and climate scientist, and Matthew Olzmann, poet

“Volcanic and mesmerizing”

—Mikal Wix, West Trade Review