RK Fauth

How I Came to Know the Roses: A Taxonomy in Verse
2026-27 Folger Institute Artistic Research Fellow

RK Fauth is a poet with an interest in the relationship between queerness and the history of botanical taxonomy. Her research at the Folger considers how the Enlightenment-era foundations of flower sexuality–and the slippery metaphors that beget scientific fact–shaped modern ideas of gender, nature, and desire. RK is working on a found poetry project that deconstructs the language of botanical reproduction in the Linnaean and pre-Linnaean traditions (1500-1753), looking at the relational poetics of herbals, natural histories, and florilegium. Through poetry, her goal is to recover and rearrange the associative charge that knits botany’s rigid taxonomies together, making new poems that push “unnaturalness” toward kinship and belonging.

RK has held artist residencies at Art Omi, Djerassi, and the Oak Spring Garden Foundation. She’s received scholarships from the The Fulbright Program, The Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and Georgetown’s Lannan Center for Poetics and Social Practice.