Rosemurgy, Catie Jeanne 1969–

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Rosemurgy, Catie Jeanne 1969–

(Catherine Jeanne Rosemurgy)

PERSONAL:

Born 1969. Education: Macalester College, B.A.; University of Alabama, M.F.A.

ADDRESSES:

Home—Philadelphia, PA. Office—English Department, Bliss Hall 129, College of New Jersey, P.O. Box 7718, 2000 Pennington Rd., Ewing, NJ 08628. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER:

Writer and educator. Northwest Missouri State University, Maryville, assistant professor of English; College of New Jersey, Ewing, assistant professor of creative writing.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Writers' Award for poetry, Rona Jaffe Foundation, 2001; poetry grant, National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), 2007.

WRITINGS:

My Favorite Apocalypse: Poems, Graywolf Press (St. Paul, MN), 2001.

Contributor of poetry to Ploughshares, River Styx, Poetry Northwest, Cream City Review, Southern Review and Iowa Review.

SIDELIGHTS:

Catie Jeanne Rosemurgy is a poet and educator who lives in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Rosemurgy studied poetry at the University of Alabama, where she received her M.F.A. She has taught creative writing as an assistant professor at the College of New Jersey, in Ewing, and she is the recipient of both a NEA grant and the Rona Jaffe Foundation's Writers' Award for poetry. In a statement she provided to the NEA, Rosemurgy wrote that she remains "utterly grateful for the endowment" and called the prize a "fine and sustaining national tradition." Rosemurgy has also contributed poetry to many periodicals, including Ploughshares, River Styx, Poetry Northwest, Cream City Review, Southern Review, and Iowa Review.

Rosemurgy published My Favorite Apocalypse: Poems, a collection of her own poetry, in 2001 through Graywolf Press. Elizabeth Polls, in her article for the Daily Nebraskan, reported that Rosemurgy had been "inspired by poet W.B. Yeats and his idea of ‘tragic joy,’" or the thought that "people must identify with both the joyful and destructive forces of the universe or they will be destroyed when something bad happens," which is what led to her choice of title. My Favorite Apocalypse covers an array of human interactions such as adultery, love, lust, and idolatry in a volume containing approximately fifty-four individual poems and a concluding notes section. A Publishers Weekly contributor found that the book contained "tumbling, delicate metaphors" and described it as a "lyric, relationship-oriented collection." Furthermore, Tom Williams, in his critique for the American Book Review, stated: "What Rosemurgy has mined from the best of rock and roll and poetry is the spirit of transgression in those enterprises." In particular, Williams found that the poems concerning the characters Grace and Billy had "magnificently long titles and wonderfully apt phrases." Also commenting on Rosemurgy's idiom, Richard Newman, in an essay for the Southern Indiana Review, related that "her poems are far more than assemblages of cut-n-paste, though. Catie Rosemurgy also knows how to end a poem. A poem of hers may press through the paces of stunning lines, humor, and unabashed honesty, but the best of her poems end with a poignancy that gently nudges against the line of sentimentality." By sentimentality, Newman refers to the shared topic of love that each poem addresses albeit with different treatments of the topic, and Newman found that Rosemurgy "writes some of the best lines in contemporary poetry."