Kristin Dykstra

Kristin Dykstra is a writer, literary translator, and scholar. She is the author of Dissonance, published by the University of Chicago Press in 2025. Her most recent interview about the book appeared in Asymptote in early 2026. Among Dykstra’s other awards are the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship for Literary Translation. Her most recent book-length translation, The Star-Spangled Brand by Marcelo Morales, appeared in early 2025. Dykstra’s translations of poems by Manuel Becerra from Mexico are forthcoming later this year in Poetry

Dissonance

A collection of poems and photographs that take the foothills of Vermont’s Green Mountains as a microcosm for considering climate change, borders, and community life.

In Dissonance, translator Kristin Dykstra’s first book of original poetry, the author leads us to inner worlds shaped partly by the New England countryside, tracking shifts in the region’s nature, infrastructure, and people, while sharing observations on borders and climate catastrophe that reverberate globally. Dykstra condenses signs of urban expansion, economic division, and battles over democracy into an innovative meditation. With a dynamic approach to form, musicality, and scope, Dissonance explores ways of experiencing regional landscapes and imagined communities in the twenty-first century.

Through her extended sequence of prose poems, photographs, and lyric fragments, Dykstra merges clips from documents and dialogues with observations drawn from two local libraries and her daily walks down a dirt road through Vermont’s foothills. As she moves down this public road, which lies within the nation’s federally designated hundred-mile border zone, she finds a daily convergence of tensions. Dissonance asks how poetry can unsettle impressions of a place, and how that process, in turn, disturbs impressions of self, of others, and of time itself.

Dissonance is the recipient of the third annual Phoenix Emerging Poet Book Prize and is a Vermont Book Award finalist in 2026.