BIO
Kurt Olsson’s a former Peace Corps volunteer who taught at a small university in the Ferghana Valley in Central Asia in the late 1990s. Two years ago, Kurt moved to Wisconsin so he could live a few blocks from Lake Michigan and pursue his doctorate in English at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee.
Kurt lives with his youngest daughter, four cats, and an American pit bull terrier named Coco. He volunteers with the Wisconsin Humane Society, facilitates classes for the National Alliance on Mental Illness, and tutors as part of Common Ground’s Future Scholars Program.
The Unnumbered Anniversaries (Fernwood Press), released in September 2025, is Kurt’s third collection of poetry.
Kurt’s second book, Burning Down Disneyland (Gunpowder Press), won the Barry Spacks Poetry Prize. Kurt’s first collection, What Kills What Kills Us (Silverfish Review Press), won the Gerald Cable Book Award; the Towson University Prize for Literature, given annually to the best book published by a Maryland writer; and Peace Corps Writers’ Best Poetry Book of 2008.
Kurt’s poems have appeared in many publications, including Poetry, The New Republic, Southern Review, and The Threepenny Review.
POEMS
PRAISE
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Kurt Olsson reminds us that nostalgia is not to be trusted and that days can be measured by ‘after I shoved a bean up my nose / but before I gave in and walked out on my life.’ And yet The Unnumbered Anniversaries is full of small, sweet pleasures, as long as you can take comfort in the absurd, the temporary, and the grace of Willie Mays making a world-saving catch.
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I love the title of this book... and I love the innovative mischief of its poems. Let it be known: a true poetic intelligence and imagination live between its covers.
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Olsson’s poems in What Kills What Kills Us set us at a threshold between the deadweight of utter despair and the balm of the comedic. We are offered no easy option: neither to stay on one side or the other, nor to balance upon the razor’s edge between them.
Sandra Beasley on The Unnumbered Anniversaries
Thomas Lux on Burning Down Disneyland
Eric Pankey on What Kills What Kills Us
EVENTS
Poetry Reading
November 14, 2025 @ 6:30pm
United We Read
Boswell Books
2559 N. Downer Ave.
Milwaukee, WI
Poetry Reading
November 22, 2025 @ 2:00pm
Woodland Pattern
720 E. Locust St.
Milwaukee, WI