KB Ballentine teaches creative writing, theatre arts, and literature to high school and college students, her home nestled at the base of the Appalachian Mountains in Tennessee. She has an M.A. in Writing from the University of Tennessee, Chattanooga, and an M.F.A. in Creative Writing, Poetry from Lesley University in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Her work has appeared in numerous journals and publications, including Atlanta Review, North Dakota Quarterly, Linnet’s Wings, Crab Orchard Review, Alehouse, Tidal Basin Review, Haight–Ashbury Literary Journal, The Sigh Press, and MO: Writings from the River.
Ballentine’s eighth collection Spirit of Wild was published by Blue Light Press in March 2023. Edge of the Echo from Iris Press launched in 2021, and The Light Tears Loose appeared the summer of 2019, also from Blue Light Press. 2017 showcased Ballentine's fifth poetry collection Almost Everything, Almost Nothing, published by Middle Creek Publishing and Audio. In 2016, The Perfume of Leaving received the Blue Light Press Book Award.
Her work also appears in several anthologies: White Stag: Spirit Anthology (2023), LOVE Anthology (2023), Women Speak: Volume 8 (2022), Appalachia (Un)Masked (2022), I Thought I Heard a Cardinal Sing (2022), The Strategic Poet (2021), Women Speak: Vol 7 (2021), Pandemic Puzzle Poems (2021), The Mountain (2021), Pandemic Evolution (2021), In Plein Air (2017), Carrying the Branch: Poets in Search of Peace (2017), In God's Hands (2017), River of Earth and Sky: Poems for the Twenty-first Century (2015), Southern Poetry Anthology, Volume VI: Tennessee (2013) and Southern Light: Twelve Contemporary Southern Poets (2011).
She was selected as a finalist for the Southern Alliance of Literature Outstanding Writer for 2021; she was awarded the Libba Moore Gray Poetry Prize in 2016, in 2014 she was a finalist in the Ron Rash Poetry Awards, and in 2006 a finalist for the Joy Harjo Poetry Award. She was a recipient of the Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Prize in 2006 and in 2007.
