Caitlin Scarano

Caitlin Scarano is a writer based in Bellingham, Washington. She holds a PhD from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, an MFA from the University of Alaska Fairbanks, and an MA from Bowling Green State University. Her latest chapbook, HOW HE LOVED THE BONES, is now available from Lillet Press. Her second full length collection of poems, THE NECESSITY OF WILDFIRE, was selected by Ada Limón as the winner of the Wren Poetry Prize and will be released in spring 2022 by Blair.

Limón writes: “Hungry, clear-eyed, tough, and generous, THE NECESSITY OF WILDFIRE is a book that creates a humming musicality out of the early sorrows and rough stones of life. Cinematic and sound-driven, these are brilliant and honest personal poems that open up to the larger universal truths. These poems are gorgeous and complex.”

In May 2021, Bear Gallery (Fairbanks, Alaska) exhibited Caitlin and Megan Perra's collaborative project “The Ten-Oh-Two”—poems and visual art on the Porcupine Caribou Herd. Caitlin is a member of the Washington Wolf Advisory Group and a current participant in the Bonanza Creek Long-Term Ecological Research (LTER)’s In a Time of Change (ITOC) program. She was selected as a participant in the NSF’s Antarctic Artists & Writers Program and spent November 2018 in McMurdo Station in Antarctica. Caitlin’s debut collection of poems, DO NOT BRING HIM WATER was released in Fall 2017.