Tricia Knoll’s kinship with urban wildlife includes tree hugging; tending butterfly, native plant, herb and vegetable gardens, and volunteer work as a Master Gardener. She lives in Vermont with five acres of woods and is working daily to remove invasive buckthorn. She has a pond full of frogs and under rocks is continually surprised to find red-backed salamanders. She routinely talks to crows who ignore her – and was once bitten on the neck by a captive coyote. These experiences inspired poetry in One Bent Twig coming out from Future Cycle Press in January 2023.

She has degrees in literature from Stanford University (BA) and Yale University (MAT). Her poetry and haiku appear in numerous journals and  anthologies.

She is grateful for the good health that has allowed her to write dozens of  poems since she retired. Let’s Hear It for the Horses came out in February 2022 after receiving third place in The Poetry Box’s 2021 chapbook contest. Checkered Mates, published in 2021,  collects poems about relationships that work and some that don’t.

How I Learned To Be White received the 2018 the Gold Prize for Poetry Book Category for Motivational Poetry in the Human Relations Indie Book Prize. Urban Wild is her first chapbook (Finishing Line Press 2014.) Ocean’s Laughter, a full-length book which combines lyric and eco-poetry about Manzanita, Oregon came out from Aldrich Press in 2016.  Broadfork Farm includes poems about her experience farm sitting for several weeks at a small organic farm in Trout Lake, Washington. Checkered Mates (Kelsay Books, 2021)  collects poems about relationships that work – and the strangeness of many that don’t.

Her careers spanned teaching high school English in New Haven, Connecticut and in Portland, Oregon. For a brief time, as a free lance writer she wrote a text book on Asian immigration to the West Coast – Becoming Americans — Asian Sojourners, Immigrants and Refugees. She served as the Public Relations Director for the Portland Children’s Musem for 10 years and later as Public Information Officer for the Portland Water Bureau. She responded as a Public Information Officer with the Water Bureau’s response to aid the New Orleans Water and Board after Hurricane Katrina and implemented the first blog for a water utility. She served on Portland’s Human Rights Commission for three years.

Knoll is a Contributing Editor to Verse Virtual.

In October 2018 Gyroscope Review published an interview with Knoll.

You can listen to Tricia’s podcast concerning her experience as a poet with spasmodic dysphonia and a reading from Urban Wild.

Tricia’s story of publication 40 years ago . Several of her poems were printed in View From The Bottom, a street tabloid in New Haven, Connecticut in the early 1970s, a zine  that  was printed on the Black Panther’s press.