Katie Farris (born August 10, 1983) is an American poet, fiction writer, translator, academic and editor.
Life and career
Katie Farris has published poetry and prose in publications such as The New York Times, The Nation, The Yale Review,McSweeneys, Granta, The Believer, Poetry, Poetry London, American Poetry Review, Paris Review and O, The Oprah Magazine.
Farris is the author of Standing in the Forest of Being Alive (Alice James Books) which has been called “wondrous” (Publishers Weekly, “brilliant” (Jericho Brown), “saturated with love and intellectual ardor” (World Literature Today), “genius” (Kaveh Akbar), and “perfect” (Harvard Review).
Farris is also the author of BOYSGIRLS (Tupelo Press) which was called “truly innovative” (Prague Post ), “a tour de force” (Robert Coover ), and “a book with gigantic scope. At some points it reads like the book of Genesis; at others, like a dream-turned-nightmare. From the opening lines the author grabs you by the throat.” (Louisville Courier-Journal ). She is also the author of several chapbooks, including A Net to Catch My Body in Its Weaving which was published as the winner of The Beloit Poetry Journal's national competition and was called “luminous” (The Los Angeles Review of Books) and “extraordinary” (Paris Review ). Berlin-based press Five Hundred Places published her Thirteen Intimacies. Several of her books have been published in Russian and Ukrainian. Next year, Valparaiso Ediciones in Mexico City will publish a Spanish language edition of Farris’ work, niñosniñas, translated by the acclaimed Mexican writer Pura López Colomé.
Farris's translations have been published in The Atlantic Monthly and featured in platforms such as MoMA, praised in The New Yorker, and included in anthologies from Penguin, Graywolf, and Harper Collins.
She is the co-editor and co-translator of several books including Gossip and Metaphysics: Russian Modernist Poems and Prose (Tupelo) as well as Guy Jean's If I Were Born in Prague (Argos Books) and Mourning Ploughs the Winter (Marick Press). Farris won the DJS Translation Award from Poetry East/West for her co-translations in New Cathay: Contemporary Chinese Poetry, 1990-2012 (Tupelo Press ) Most recently, she has co-translated and co-edited as A Country Where Everyone Name is Fear by Boris and Ludmila Khersonsky (Lost Horse Press) which was chosen as one of the "The Best Books of the Year" by World Literature Today.
She is the recipient of the Pushcart Prize, Chad Walsh Prize from The Beloit Poetry Journal, Anne Halley Poetry Prize from The Massachusetts Review, Flash Fairy Tale Prize from the Fairy Tale Review, and Orison Award in Fiction.
Farris held the Irving Bacheller Chair in Creative Writing at Rollins College. She has also taught at UC Berkeley and Brown University, New England College, Georgia Institute of Technology, and for many years in the MFA Program at San Diego State University where she won an Innovation in Teaching Award. Currently, she teaches at Princeton University.
Selected Published works
Books and Chapbooks
"Standing in the Forest of Being Alive" (Alice James Books, 2023), author
"A NET TO CATCH MY BODY IN ITS WEAVING" (Winner of the Chad Walsh Chapbook Prize, Beloit Poetry Journal, 2021), author "BOYSGIRLS" (Tupelo Press, 2018, earlier edition was published by Marick Press), author
Translations
The Country Where Everyone's Name is Fear: Poems of Boris and Ludmila Khersonsky (Lost Horse Press, Idaho, 2022), co-editor and co-translator If I Were Born In Prague: Poems of Guy Jean (Argos Books, New Hampshire, 2011), co-translator This Lamentable City: Poems of Polina Baskova (Tupelo Press, Vermont 2010), co-translator Traveling Musicians: Selected Poems of Polina Barskova (Yunost Publishers, Moscow, 2006), co-translator
Editor
"Gossip and Metaphysics: Russian Modernist Poetry and Prose" (Tupelo Press, 2015), co-editor and co-translator
Critical reception
In Paris Review, Maureen N. McLane writes: "...extraordinary poems by Katie Farris—riddling, devastating, peculiarly spritely poems about death, cancer, Emily Dickinson, the limits of mind and body.
Her first full-length collection, Standing in the Forest of Being Alive, is due out from Alice James in 2023. The heart knocks fast with and for this poet, the top of one’s head blown off, as Emily Dickinson almost said."