BIO
Originally from Southside Virginia, Caitlin Scarano is a writer and educational professional based in Bellingham, Washington. She holds a PhD from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, an MFA from the University of Alaska Fairbanks, and an MA from Bowling Green State University. She currently does writing editing and coaching, and teaches through Writers.com.
She is a 2024-2025 Watershed Fellow with the Public Humanities Collaboratory in Oregon. She was recently selected as the winner of CutBank’s 2024 Genre Contest in Poetry and won LitMag’s 2024 Chekhov Award for Flash Fiction.
Her second full length collection of poems, The Necessity of Wildfire, was selected by Ada Limón as the winner of the Wren Poetry Prize and is now available. Order through Blair.
The Necessity of Wildfire won a 2023 Pacific Northwest Book Award and was a finalist for a Washington State Book Award in Poetry.
Of the collection, Limón writes:
“Hungry, clear-eyed, tough, and generous, THE NECESSITY OF WILDFIRE is a book that creates a humming musicality out of the early sorrows and rough stones of life. Cinematic and sound-driven, these are brilliant and honest personal poems that open up to the larger universal truths. These poems are gorgeous and complex.”
Cover art for The Necessity of Wildfire (Blair, 2022)
In May 2021, Bear Gallery (Fairbanks, Alaska) exhibited Caitlin and Megan Perra's collaborative project “The Ten-Oh-Two”—poems and visual art on the Porcupine Caribou Herd. Learn more about this project here.
Caitlin is a member of the Washington Wolf Advisory Group and was a recent participant in the Bonanza Creek Long-Term Ecological Research (LTER)’s In a Time of Change (ITOC) program. She was selected as a participant in the NSF’s Antarctic Artists & Writers Program and spent November 2018 in McMurdo Station in Antarctica.
Caitlin’s debut collection of poems, Do Not Bring Him Water, was released in Fall 2017. These are some of her other chapbooks:
How He Loved the Bones (2021)
Read Jonathan Kelly’s review here.
The Hatchet and the Hammer (2020)
Tending Fire (2019)
Pitcher of Cream (2016)
“Do Not Bring Him Water beckons the reader with its nostalgic pastoral landscape, then haunts them with the shadows of menacing animals and men. The writing is disarming, lyrical, and unhinged, and it often took me until the end of a poem to realize I’d been holding my breath the whole time. It’s hard to believe this is a debut collection: the author has seen so much and lived to tell about it, and tell it with gorgeous darkness. This book will make you rethink language.”
“...I set fire to the Virginia field and rode
out. Made for a mountain, her
crown of snow. A single
spider crossed my cheek.
How I untangled
the fishing wire from flesh.
How I learned to unlove that man
before I swallowed the hook
of his death.”
"Mule"
Photo credit: Ariel Waldman
On American, the complexity of ice, and heading back to the States…