Kevin FitzPatrick was educated at the University of Minnesota and the University of Saint Thomas. He was the editor of the Lake Street Review, a Minneapolis and Saint Paul literary magazine that ran from 1977 to 1991.
Besides coordinating the Lake Street Writers’ Workshop and teaching poetry and fiction writing, he was a postal clerk, ice-cube factory worker, park grounds keeper, bartender, self-defense instructor, sports director, and claims examiner.
Kevin’s work has been published in hundreds of magazines, newspapers and anthologies. In addition, his poetry has been heard on The Writer’s Almanac with Garrison Keillor and on Weekend Edition over Minnesota Public Radio and other public radio stations. He read his poetry in the Lowertown Reading Jam Series with Carol Connolly, Ethna McKiernan, and others.
Currently his books are in over 140 libraries nationwide.
BOOK REVIEWS
DOWN ON THE CORNER
“Down on the Corner is a perfect example of what it means to write with a sense of place.”
– Mary Ann Grossmann, Saint Paul Pioneer Press
RUSH HOUR
“Rush Hour's palpable poems palpably about people - people working at jobs or otherwise finding things to do. Reading them is like peering into lives through clear new windows.”
– Small Pond
KEVIN FITZPATRICK GREATEST HITS 1975-2000
“In the populist tradition of Meridel LeSueur, and with the empathy and compassion of John Beecher or Carl Sandburg for the unemployed and the disenfranchised, FitzPatrick writes of urban Minnesota as no poet since James Wright in Shall We Gather at the River.”
– The North Stone Review
STILL LIVING IN TOWN
“Poet Kevin FitzPatrick, while Still Living in Town, travels between urban and rural worlds when his partner, Tina, buys an eighty-acre farm and returns to her roots. His evolving observations, evocative imagery, and often wry humor explore a country life of raising chickens and sheep, as well as tending to dogs, cats and horses. Best of all, FitzPatrick’s appreciation of the richness of difference as he traverses from city to country in these tightly structured, deceptively prosaic poems is laced through with a calm but delicious irony.”
– Dave Moore