Kathleen S. Burgess grew up in Urbana, Ohio, at a time in which travel abroad seemed impossible. After living in Washington, D.C., meeting immigrants from El Salvador, and hearing their stories, she decided to travel  to El Salvador and beyond. She has been writing poems about the year she spent hitchhiking to Peru. These combine her passions for indigenous cultures, social justice, music, and children, and they offer a view beyond our borders, beyond what makes news in the United States.

Her poetry appears in North American Review, Sou'wester, Pavement Saw, Main Street Rag, Evening Street Review, Pudding Magazine - the International Journal of Applied Poetry, and other journals and anthologies.

Kathleen won the 2006 Confluence Poetry Prize among other prizes. She is a senior editor at Pudding House Publications, publisher of her 2006 chapbook Shaping What Was Left and an upcoming anthology she is editing, Reeds and Rushes—Pitch, Buzz, and Hum.

A graduate of The Ohio State University and the University of Rio Grande, she currently lives in Chillicothe, Ohio, with her husband Jack Burgess, and occasionally their daughter and son who visit. In the Chillicothe City Schools she shares with elementary school children her love and knowledge of music.