Faculty Profile for Professor Kale Hensley
Professor Kale Hensley
Asst Professor of Instruction — English
LAMP 309G
phone: (512) 245-6219
Biography Section
Biography and Education
Kale Hensley is a poet, visual artist, and educator whose work explores the intersections of queerness, spirituality, and hybrid literary forms. She teaches courses in composition at Texas State University, where she emphasizes writing as both a critical and creative practice. Her poetry and interdisciplinary work appear in Gulf Coast, Evergreen Review, BOOTH, and Epiphany, among other journals, and have been nominated multiple times for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. She is currently at work on a novel loosely inspired by the life of St. Brigid of Kildare.Education:
BA West Virginia University, English & Religious Studies
MFA Texas State University, Poetry
Research Interests
Feminist poetics, queer theory and queer poetics, mystical and visionary writing, ecopoetics, post-confessional and neo-confessional poetry, hybrid and collage-based aesthetics, Southern and Appalachian literary traditions, ars poetica as political gesture.Selected Scholarly/Creative Work
- Hensley, K. L. (2025, June). The Gentle Art of Leeching. Gulf Coast. Retrieved from https://gulfcoastmag.org/stories/372-summerfall-2025,4803
- Hensley, K. L. (2025, January). The Works of Flesh Are Manifest. BOOTH. Retrieved from https://booth.butler.edu/2025/01/03/the-works-of-flesh-are-manifest/
- Hensley, K. L. (2024, December). Creation Myth: Phyllis Rides Aristotle. Evergreen Review. Retrieved from https://evergreenreview.com/read/the-rest-cure-for-common-whores/
- Hensley, K. L. (2024, July). A Bed Built on Wheels. So to Speak: A Journal of Feminist Art and Language. Retrieved from https://www.sotospeakjournal.org/kale-hensley-a-bed-built
- Hensley, K. L. (2024, April). When the Last Trumpet Sounds, I Will Be in the Mummy Room at the Museum. Gulf Stream. Retrieved from https://gulfstreamlitmag.com/2024/04/16/when-the-last-trumpet-sounds-i-will-be-in-the-mummy-room-at-the-museum/
Selected Awards
- Award / Honor Nominee: Pushcart Prize, Many Nice Donkeys. November 2024
- Award / Honor Nominee: Pushcart Prize, The Hopper. November 2024
- Award / Honor Nominee: Best of the Net: Nonfiction, So to Speak. September 2024
- Award / Honor Recipient: Fulbright Teaching Scholarship in Latvia, U.S. Department of State. September 2019 - March 2020