Member Info

KB Ballentine resides in Chattanooga, Tennessee, and teaches creative writing, theatre arts, and literature to high school and college students. She has an M.A. in Writing and an M.F.A. in Creative Writing, Poetry. Her work has appeared in numerous journals and publications, including Atlanta Review, Linnet’s Wings, Crab Orchard Review, Alehouse, Tidal Basin Review, Haight–Ashbury Literary Journal, The Sigh Press, and MO: Writings from the River. Ballentine’s eighth collection Spirit of Wild was published by Blue Light Press in March 2023. Edge of the Echo was the 2021 publication by Iris Press. The Light Tears Loose appeared the summer of 2019 from Blue Light Press. 2017 showcased Ballentine\'s fifth poetry collection Almost Everything, Almost Nothing, published by Middle Creek Publishing and Audio. In 2016, The Perfume of Leaving received the Blue Light Press Book Award. Her work also appears in several anthologies: The Strategic Poet (2021), I Though I Heard a Cardinal Sing (2021), Pandemic Puzzle Poems (2021), Women Speak (2021), Pandemic Evolution (2021), In Plein Air (2017), Carrying the Branch: Poets in Search of Peace (2017), In God\'s Hands (2017), River of Earth and Sky: Poems for the Twenty-first Century (2015), Southern Poetry Anthology, Volume VI: Tennessee (2013) and Southern Light: Twelve Contemporary Southern Poets (2011). She was awarded the Libba Moore Gray Poetry Prize in 2016, in 2014 she was a finalist in the Ron Rash Poetry Awards, and in 2006 a finalist for the Joy Harjo Poetry Award. She was a recipient of the Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Prize in 2006 and in 2007.