KT Herr ’07
Alumnae Poet
KT Herr (they/them) is a queer poet, collagist, educator, and curious person from Lancaster, Pennsylvania.
KT holds a Ph.D. in literature and creative writing from the University of Houston, where they were awarded the Inprint C. Glenn Cambor Fellowship and the 2025–26 Inprint Paul Verlaine Prize in Poetry, as well as an M.F.A. in creative writing from Sarah Lawrence College, where they were selected to receive the 2019 Thomas Lux Award.
KT has taught classes and community workshops with Milk Press, the Marin Poetry Center, Boldface Conference, and Inprint Houston, and has visited creative writing classrooms at SUNY Stony Brook, UT Knoxville, and the University of Houston. KT is a former poetry editor at Gulf Coast Journal and The 3288 Review, and served as graduate coordinator for the University of Houston Creative Writing Program from 2022 to 2025.
KT’s poems have been selected as finalists for Best of the Net, The Adroit Journal Gregory Djanikian Scholarship, the Grist Pro Forma Contest, the Frontier OPEN Prize, and the Palette Poetry Spotlight Award; as semifinalist for the 92Y Discovery Contest; and as winner of the Sweet Poetry Contest and the American Literary Review Award in Poetry. KT’s poem “Gender study; gestalt” won second place in the 2025 SmokeLong Grand Micro Contest and was also selected to receive a 2026 Monarch Queer Literary Award from fifth wheel press, appearing in the inaugural anthology. Additionally, KT’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in Southern Indiana Review, Foglifter, The Massachusetts Review, and elsewhere.
The grateful beneficiary of creative support from numerous institutions including Inprint Houston, Vermont Studio Center, Atlantic Center for the Arts, and Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, KT is a board member with Four Way Books and lives in Houston with their family.
Select Poems
We’re on the bench around the corner from the red
brick maze behind the jungle gym & Morgan is teaching me
how to make a tune with only my two small
hands. Like this, she says, & folds concave
palms, fingers cupped as though sequestering
a captured hummingbird. She puckers
chapped lips up to her aperture of bent
thumbs, chirps blow, then looses a hoot from puffed
cheeks, owl-bright & eerie
under gathering clouds. Nightshade berries
stain my knees. I slobber myself spitless
against knuckles that won’t sound. Meanwhile,
boys play tag. At lunch Morgan told us
the only girls Chris whips with his sweatshirt
are girls he wants to kiss. Morgan
is the only girl Chris whips
with his sweatshirt. Morgan is the only girl
Ms. Wooley picked twice for line-leader. I crouch
center-maze on crumbled brick, kissing
my hand. I crush the invisible
bird, make it a mouth. Then a church. Here
is the steeple. Open the doors, see
how the walls are pocked
with soil. Dirty, torn-nail
parishioners. Ms. Wooley calls, but I’m holding
choir auditions. At Chris’s locker, I make
the caught-bird shape
and say like this, my thumbs tucked
inside, wrong, but we blow
until our hands are slick with
spit, giggles rounding the hall, sweatshirt sleeves
pushed past our elbows. I can’t decide
whose hands make a better cage.