Author Q&A with Katharine Jager
May 28, 2025
Katharine Jager is a poet and medieval scholar. She is Professor of English at the University of Houston-Downtown, and has published poems in such venues as The Gettysburg Review, Friends Journal, Commonweal, GoodFoot, The Red River Review and the Yale Anthology: Before the Door of God, among other places.
Her poem, Enumeration, is featured in our spring issue.
Tell us about yourself.
I am a poet and medievalist, and live in Houston with my three sons and husband.
What unique or surprising detail can you tell us about the origin, revision process, and/or final version of your piece appearing in this issue?
This poem emerged from archival research I conducted at Texas Southern University, looking at their Heartman collection of artifacts related to enslavement. There was a register contained in that collection that documented the enslaved people who’d been taken from Mississippi to Texas in the 19th century; this register actually named each enslaved person, which was somewhat unusual. I teach a course on reparations, and we’d already discussed and examined the Harris County “slave schedules,” which were the way that the U.S. Census bureau accounted for enslaved people–by age, sex, and often color. In the “slave schedules,” enslaved people are not given names; the archive treats them as property, not human beings.
What did you learn (about yourself or craft or life in general) through writing and revising it?
One of the things I learned through drafting and revising this poem was that a great deal of my thinking about race and history and place is filtered through my love for my sons, who are mixed race.
What do you hope readers take from the piece?
I hope that readers take from this piece a sense of empathy and concern for how the past might still resonate into the present.
What fuels your desire to write (or engage in other creative outlets)? Or what have been the biggest influences in your writing?
The biggest influences on my writing are (of course!) other writers. In my case, those are poets with whom I have studied, like Marie Ponsot, Sharon Olds, Marie Howe, Jean Valentine. But there are writers whom I’ve only read and studied who deeply influence my poetry, and those include poets like Amy Clampitt, May Sarton, Basil Bunting, Adrienne Rich, and of course the greats like Hopkins, Dickinson, Whitman.
How do you make expression a part of your daily life? Or how do you find a balance between your writing and other responsibilities?
Balancing writing and the responsibilities of motherhood and being a professor can be really challenging. I’ve found that I need a deadline, so I like taking writing workshops with a (for me, local) gambit called Grackle and Grackle. I also have a few writing groups I belong to that meet sporadically and when we do see each other, it’s a creative godsend of shared work and good writing prompts.
What do you think when you hear, “the good life”?
“The good life” means time, for me. Time enough to make poems, time enough to be in my garden, abundant time to be with my children and spouse.
Thank you, Katharine, for being a part of our growing community and for spending extra time with us on this Q&A. We’re glad we were able to connect and we wish you the best with your current and future writing endeavors.
