Knox College English professor and lifelong Knox County resident Cyn Kitchen joined Galesburg's Morning News Friday to talk about her first full-length poetry collection, Broken Hallelujah, published by Finishing Line Press.
Kitchen, who grew up in Galesburg and graduated from GHS in 1982, returned to higher education 14 years after high school — starting at Carl Sandburg College before earning her degree at Knox College, where she now serves as professor and chair of the English department.
In this conversation, Kitchen talks about the title and philosophy behind Broken Hallelujah, the writing window at her Maquon home that looks out onto the prairie, the role of faith, doubt, and grief in the collection, and what it means to spend decades teaching others to write while quietly building her own body of work.
Kitchen closes the interview by reading her poem "The Returning" — inspired by the massive flocks of snow geese that fill the Knox County skies each spring.
Broken Hallelujah is currently available for pre-order at a discount through cynkitchen.net, with June delivery. Hard copies will be available to the general public after June.
Topics covered in this interview include:
- The meaning behind the title Broken Hallelujah and the philosophy of finding beauty in imperfect things
- How the Knox County prairie shapes every poem in the collection
- The writing window at her Maquon home — 14 years of bearing witness to the seasons
- Faith, doubt, and grief — and the presence of her mother in the collection
- Her non-traditional path to Knox College and a career in teaching
- Teaching creative writing while continuing to write herself
- How a poem begins — and why she can't write on command
- Why poetry has become her favorite form
- How to pre-order Broken Hallelujah
- A live reading of "The Returning"
Cyn Kitchen's work has appeared in American Writer's Review, Poetry South, Poetry Quarterly, Cutleaf, and Appalachian Review. A Pushcart Prize nominee, her work has been shortlisted for the Raymond Carver Short Story Award, the storySouth Million Writers Award, and Best of the Web. She is also the author of Ten Tongues, a collection of short stories.