RK Fauth is a poet who writes about ecological grief, awe, and the un/natural world. Her debut collection, A Dream in Which I Am Playing with Bees (2024), explores the relationship between species extinction and language. Playing with Bees won the Walt McDonald First Book Prize in Poetry from Texas Tech University Press. Fauth’s collection was also a finalist for the Audre Lorde Award in Poetry (The Publishing Triangle) and the Julie Suk Award (Jacar Press). It was long-listed for the Laurel Prize for best book of ecopoetry (The UK Poetry School).

Fauth’s poems are published in POETRY Magazine, Poem-a-Day, AGNI, Arc Poetry (Canada), Plumwood Mountain Journal (Australia), Notch Magazine, The Shore, and several queer and environmental poetry anthologies. Most recently, her poetry was anthologized in The Gift of Animals, edited by Alison Deming and foreword by Robin Wall Kimmerer.

Fauth is the recipient of a Treehouse Climate Action Prize from the Academy of American poets, the Lois Cranston Memorial Poem Prize, and a Fulbright Fellowship. Her work has been supported by residencies at Art Omi, The Hemlock House, and The Oak Spring Garden Foundation. A first-gen college student, she earned a Master’s degree in English from Georgetown University, where she was a Poetry Fellow at the Lannan Center for Poetics and Social Practice.

From 2020-2023, Fauth ran the award-winning erasure poetry experiment, The UNPRECEDENTED Project. It involved sending hundreds of torn book pages from The Decameron to anonymous strangers in the mail during the pandemic. Each participant redacted the original text and returned their page as an erasure poem. Plotted on a digital map, the poems span fourteen countries, and can be “contact traced” back to a network of feelings distinct to this period of modernity. UNPRECEDENTED has been shared at Brown University, Johns Hopkins University, UNC-Chapel Hill, and other institutions, where Fauth has lectured on erasure poetry as a mode of saying the unsayable.

She lives between New York City and Asheville, North Carolina.