Katherine Hauth

Children’s author and poet Katherine B. Hauth grew up in Grand Rapids, Michigan. After leaving a career as a personnel analyst in Seattle, she found herself drawn to the natural rhythms she encountered in the Southwest. “The longer I lived away from city noises and distractions, the more I found nature to be essentially poetic, but I don’t mean that in a sentimental sense,” Hauth explains in a 2011 author’s statement on her publisher’s website. “I responded to its patterns, rhythms, sensuous qualities, hyperbole, and onomatopoeia. As I became more in tune with the land, it seemed natural to write its stories in the language of poetry. And so—aided by reading poetry and taking poetry classes and workshops—I became a poet.”

A 2010 writer for Kirkus Reviews described What’s for Dinner? Quirky, Squirmy Poems from the Animal World (2011) as an “enriching overview of the natural world spiced with a Dorothy Parker-esque sense of the macabre that children will absolutely relish,” noting that some “poems look at the wildly diverse ways in which organisms lure or capture their prey; still others break down sophisticated concepts like symbiosis and parasitism in brilliantly accessible terms.”

Hauth is also the author of Night Life of the Yucca: The Story of a Flower and a Moth (1996). She lives in Rio Rancho, New Mexico.