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Narrative Bio

Vincent Katz is a poet, translator, critic, editor, and curator. He is the author of fourteen books of poetry, including Daffodil (2025, Alfred A. Knopf), Broadway for Paul (2020, Alfred A. Knopf), Southness (2016, Lunar Chandelier Press), Swimming Home, (2015, Nightboat Books), Rapid Departures (2005, Ateliê Editorial), Understanding Objects (2000, Hard Press), Pearl (1998, powerHouse Books) and Cabal of Zealots (1988, Hanuman Books). 

He won the 2005 National Translation Award, given by the American Literary Translators Association, for his book of translations from Latin, The Complete Elegies of Sextus Propertius (2004, Princeton University Press). He was awarded a Rome Prize Fellowship in Literature at the American Academy in Rome for 2001-2002. His translations of the Theogony and Works and Days of the Ancient Greek poet Hesiod are forthcoming from David Zwirner Books ekphrasis series.

Katz's poems have been published in the journals Aufgabe, Bomb, Bombay Gin, The Brooklyn Rail, Conjunctions, Court Green, Duck, The East Village, EOAGH 13 (Queering Language), Esopus, Evergreen Review, Free Verse, Jacket, JOURNAL, Letterbox, LIT, LiVE MAG!, Lungfull!, Milk, Mipoesias, Mississippi Review, New American Writing, Per Contra, peripheries, Pressed Wafer, PoetsArtists, Provincetown Arts, R&R, Shampoo, Shiny, Shuffle Boil, and Skanky Possum. His prose has been published in Julebord and on the Paris Review website.

Katz has done book collaborations with artists and poets, including Richard Bosman, Accounts (2025, Karma Books), Andrei Codrescu, A Possible Epic of Care (2023, Black Widow Press), Anne Waldman, Fantastic Caryatids (2016, BlazeVOX Books), Alex Katz, Odes (2015, Bernard Chauveau Editeur), Alex Katz, Swimming Home (2012, Graphicstudio), Alex Katz, The Dive (2011, Brandhorst Stiftung), Francesco Clemente, Alcuni Telefonini (2008, Granary Books), Matthias Mansen, Berlin (2008, Saal-Presse), Wayne Gonzales, Judge (2007, Edizioni Charta/Libellum books), James Brown, Voyages and Hyde Park Boulevard (2000, Grenfell Press), Tabboo!, Pearl (1998, powerHouse Books), Rudy Burckhardt, Boulevard Transportation (1997, Tibor de Nagy Editions) and New York Hello! (1990, Ommation Press), and Alex Katz, A Tremor In The Morning (1986, Peter Blum Edition).

Katz writes frequently on contemporary art and has published reviews, articles, and essays on a wide range of visual artists, including Ghada Amer and Reza Farkondeh, Jennifer Bartlett, Janet Fish, Nabil Nahas, Kiki Smith, Beat Streuli, and Cy Twombly. He curated the first museum retrospective of the work of Rudy Burckhardt in 1998 at the Institute of Modern Art in Valencia, Spain. In 2000, he co-curated "Rudy Burckhardt and Friends: New York Artists of the 1950s and '60s" for the Grey Art Gallery at New York University, which paired Burckhardt's portraits of artists with works by those artists. Katz curated a museum exhibition on Black Mountain College, whose catalogue, Black Mountain College: Experiment In Art, edited by Katz, was published by MIT Press in 2002 and reprinted in 2013. In 2008, he curated "Street Dance: The New York Photographs of Rudy Burckhardt" for the Museum of the City of New York.

His art criticism has been published in Acne, Apollo, Art in America, ARTnews, Art on Paper, art press, The Brooklyn Rail, Parkett, World of Interiors, and Tate Etc. His poetry criticism has been published in The Brooklyn Rail, Jacket, The Poetry Project Newsletter, The Poetry Project website, Hidden Agendas: Unreported Poetics, and Sibila.

Vincent Katz and Vivien Bittencourt's video documentary, Man in the Woods: The Art of Rudy Burckhardt, was screened at the 22nd Montreal International Festival of Films on Art, 2004. Their film, Kiki Smith: Squatting The Palace, was shown at the Film Forum in New York, the 25th Montreal International Festival of Films on Art, 2007, and other film festivals. In 2026, Oliver Katz and Vincent Katz released the documentary Golden Gate: an Oral History of Bay Area Poetics, featuring interviews with Bill Berkson, Norma Cole, Diane di Prima, Joanne Kyger, Aram Saroyan, Anne Waldman, and others.  

Katz has taught at the Yale University School of Art, in the Art Writing MFA program at the School of Visual Arts (New York), the Summer Writing Program at Naropa University (Boulder, Colorado), the University of Campinas (Brazil), and The Poetry Project (New York). He lives in New York City where he curated the Readings in Contemporary Poetry series at Dia Art Foundation from 2010 to 2021.