Bio

Cathy Cultice Lentes is a poet, essayist, and children’s writer. She has been writing and publishing since the age of eight when her first poem appeared in a small-town Ohio newspaper. She was born in Xenia and grew up near Springfield. From 1987 to 2025, she lived and worked in the Appalachian foothills of southeast Ohio, a few winding miles from the Ohio River, halfway between Cincinnati and Pittsburgh. She now lives and writes in the Tidewater region of Virginia between the James and York Rivers.

Her poem, Approaching Chester, Ohio, was the winner of the Year 2000 Appalachian Poetry Competition sponsored by Now & Then: The Appalachian Magazine and The Center for Appalachian Studies and Services, and was published in the 2002 University of Akron Press anthology, I Have My Own Song For It: Modern Poems of Ohio. In 2003, community and state officials recognized Lentes as a Woman Making a Difference in the Arts.

Other writing has appeared in anthologies such as Every River On Earth: Writing From Appalachian Ohio (Ohio University Press, 2015),  Feminine Rising: Voices of Power & Invisibility (Cynren Press, 2019), I Thought I Heard A Cardinal Sing: Ohio’s Appalachian Voices (Sheila Na-Gig Editions, 2022). Lentes was a longtime participant in the Women of Appalachia/Women Speak Project and has served as a juror for the series.

Lentes graduated from the Solstice MFA Program with a degree in Writing for Children and Young Adults in 2013. Her manuscript for children, Poems for Tough Times, won a 2014 Work-in-Progress Grant from the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators.

She is the author of the poetry chapbook, Getting the Mail (Finishing Line Press, 2016) , and co-author with poet Wendy McVicker, of the epistolary poetry collection, Stonger When We Touch (The Orchard Street Press, 2023).