KT Herr is a queer poet, collagist, educator, and curious person from Lancaster, Pennsylvania.

They hold an MFA in Creative Writing from Sarah Lawrence College, where they were selected to receive the 2019 Thomas Lux Award, and a PhD in Literature & Creative Writing from the University of Houston, where they were awarded the 2025-26 Inprint Paul Verlaine Prize in Poetry.

In various past lives, KT has worked as a waiter, a bartender, a restaurant manager, a podcast producer, and as a door-to-door canvasser for public media. More recently, KT was a coordinator for the Sarah Lawrence Right-to-Write Program, co-director of the Sarah Lawrence Poetry Festival, and an editorial intern with Black Lawrence Press. They have taught classes and community workshops with Milk Press, the Marin Poetry Center, and Boldface Conference, and visited creative writing classrooms at SUNY Stony Brook, UT Knoxville, and the University of Houston. KT is former poetry editor of The 3288 Review and current online poetry editor at Gulf Coast Journal, and served as graduate coordinator for the University of Houston Creative Writing Program for three years.

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 was awarded a 2026 Monarch Queer Literary Award by fifth wheel press, and was included in the inaugural anthology. Additionally, KT’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in Southern Indiana Review, Foglifter, The Massachusetts Review, and elsewhere. KT has been 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.