Cathy Gilbert lives in Central Illinois where she teaches at Heartland Community College and writes poetry and non-fiction. Her work focuses on personal experience and family history, the latter of which took her all the way to the La Brea Tar Pits in Los Angeles, California. There she volunteered in the fossil lab of the George C. Page Musuem where she cleaned fossils to get a feel for what her great-grandfather experienced when he was among the first to excavate the site in the early 1900s
Cathy Gilbert writes about her family’s history, but also about her family’s present. She raises twins with her husband, and if being parents to multiples isn’t stressful enough, Gilbert and family were spending a semester in Spain at the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic in 2020. They ended up having to exit the country quickly when world leaders began shutting down borders in March of 2020.
Cathy Gilbert’s poems and essays reflect the difficulties and discoveries of living and parenting in the modern world, all while keeping an eye on the past and what we inherit from those before us.
Why the “Real” Cathy Gilbert?
In undergrad at Illinois Wesleyan University, there were two Cathy Gilberts enrolled: a Catherine G. Gilbert and a Catherine A. Gilbert. Both went by Cathy. This caused a lot of confusion on campus: mix-ups scheduling campus visits, paperwork going to the wrong addresses, and files at the registrar’s office contained a mix of both students’ transcripts. Even students using the campus directory would get confused. Cathy G (whose author page you are currently visiting) was often on the receiving end of late-night calls to the dorm phone meant for Cathy A.
While on shift at her job as a student worker for the English department, Cathy G was bemoaning yet another identity mix-up, so the professors started calling her “the real Cathy Gilbert” to help keep things straight. Soon her fellow student workers started calling her “RCG,” and Cathy G has been the “Real” one ever since.
The Real Cathy Gilbert 