Patricia Traxler, winner of the 2019 Kansas Book Award in Poetry, is an American poet, essayist, and fiction writer who lives in Salina, Kansas. She is the author of four volumes of poetry, a novel, and a short story collection. Born and raised in San Diego, California, one of eight children in a working-class Irish-Catholic family, Traxler was much influenced by her maternal grandmother, Nora Dunne, a poet from County Cork, Ireland, who lived with the family for several years during Traxler’s childhood.