Freesia McKee
Freesia McKee (she/her) writes poetry, hybrid-genre work, lyric essays, memoir, flash fiction, book reviews, and literary criticism that connect personal history and place. She is headed to University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point in Fall of 2023 to serve as an Assistant Professor of English, specializing in poetry. In Fall of 2022, she served as the Fall Poet in Residence at Ripon College. She is a white settler who currently lives in western Illinois on the ancestral homelands of the Inoca nations, and she grew up in Milwaukee.
Freesia’s written work engages with radical compassion, care, community, and ecology. Freesia is currently writing a memoir-in-essays that takes place in South Florida. The book of poetry she drafted while Poet in Residence in Ripon last fall considers multiple Midwests, queerness in rural spaces, and interspecies kinship.
Freesia’s words have appeared in Plume, Fugue, Cleaver Magazine, About Place Journal, The Ploughshares Blog, So to Speak, Gertrude, Bone Bouquet, CALYX, Nimrod, Painted Bride Quarterly, Huffington Post, New Verse News, Lavender Review, Pleiades Book Review, and many other venues. Freesia won the 2018 Patricia Goedicke Prize in Poetry from Cutbank. In 2020, Freesia won a Christopher F. Kelly Award for Poetry through the Academy of American Poets. Headmistress Press published Freesia’s chapbook How Distant the City.
Freesia earned an MFA in poetry from Florida International University and a BA in Gender & Women’s Studies from Warren Wilson College.
Student Feedback for Freesia
Freesia allowed us space to share our stories and she listened well. I liked that we were given 3 different exercises to showcase what we learned. It was a comfortable group and somewhat therapeutic to be able to share difficult subject matters. Amona White
Freesia was excellent. She combined workshopping our poems with teaching and with writing. She did this in a very relaxed and seamless way, and accomplished all her goals for our group without rushing and without stress. Andrea Gordon
