Kai Coggin (she/her) is the Inaugural Poet Laureate of Hot Springs, AR, and a recipient of a 2024 Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellowship for her project Sharing Tree Space. She is the author of five collections, most recently Mother of Other Kingdoms (Harbor Editions, 2024). Coggin is a Certified Master Naturalist, a K-12 Teaching Artist in poetry with the Arkansas Arts Council, a CATALYZE and INTERCHANGE Grant Fellow from the Mid-America Arts Alliance, and host of the longest running consecutive weekly open mic series in the country—Wednesday Night Poetry.
Coggin was awarded the 2023 Don Munro Leadership in the Arts Award for Visionary Service, and the 2021 Governor’s Arts Award for Arts in Education. She was twice named “Best Poet in Arkansas” by the Arkansas Times, and nominated for Arkansas State Poet Laureate and Hot Springs Woman of the Year. Her fierce and tender poetry has been nominated nine times for The Pushcart Prize, and awarded Best of the Net in 2022. Ten of Kai’s poems are going to the moon with the Lunar Codex project, and on earth they have appeared or are forthcoming in POETRY, Poets(.)org, Prairie Schooner, Best of the Net, Cultural Weekly, SOLSTICE, About Place Journal, Sinister Wisdom, Lavender Review, and elsewhere. Coggin is Editor-at-Large at both SWWIM and Terrain(.)org, and serves on the Board of Directors of the Hot Springs Documentary Film Festival. www.kaicoggin.com