Joy Katz

Joy Katz writes poems and essays.

Her poetry manuscript in progress, The Color Cure, documents every minute of whiteness in her life. Her previous collections are All You Do is Perceive, a National Poetry Series finalist and a Stahlecker Selection at Four Way Books; The Garden Room (Tupelo Press); Fabulae (SIU Press); and two chapbooks, Which From That Time (Argos Books) and White: An Abstract (Bonfire Books). With Kevin Prufer, she co-edited the anthology Dark Horses: Poets on Overlooked Poems (University of Illinois Press).

Since 2015 she has collaborated in the activist art collective Ifyoureallyloveme, using word, music, and performance to create social change in Pittsburgh and other cities. Ifyoureallyloveme’s latest collaboration is OverHear/OverHere, live music for shift workers.

Her work has been honored by the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, the Pittsburgh Foundation, and the NEA. She is a former Stegner fellow, MacDowell fellow, and Raveel fellow at Dickinson House in Belgium. She has been Distinguished Visiting Writer at the University of Pittsburgh and the University of Wichita and has taught at NYU, Columbia, and The New School.

She teaches off the tenure track in Carlow University’s Madwomen in the Attic workshops for women and in Chatham University’s MFA program. She is an editor-at-large for Copper Nickel.

Trained in industrial design, she worked as a graphic designer for a decade before starting to write poems. She lives in Pittsburgh with her husband and son.