Katie Farris

Katie Farris is an award-winning fiction writer, poet, and translator. She is the author of  boysgirls,(Marick Press, 2011) which has been lauded as “truly innovative,” (Prague Post), “a tour de force” (Robert Coover, PEN/Faulkner Award-winner), and “a book with gigantic scope.” (Louisville Courier-Journal). Recently, her translations in  New Cathay: Contemporary Chinese Poetry, 1990-2012 (Tupelo Press) received the 2012 International DJS Translation Award from Poetry East/West, which is awarded in China, annually, for a “translator of exceptional skills.”

A winner of 2017  Orison Anthology Award in Fiction, Fairy Tale Review‘s 2018 Flash Fairy Tale Contest, and the 2017 Anne Halley Poetry Prize from the Massachusetts Review, she has published work in Virginia Quarterly Review, Prairie Schooner, Western Humanities Review, Literary Review, Verse, The Massachussetts Review, and many other publications. Her translations and original work have appeared in anthologies published by Penguin and Graywolf.

In 2017, Berlin-based publisher Five Hundred Places press published her Thirteen Intimacies as a part of their artist-book series, which includes works by such authors as Carl Phillips, Mary Rufle, and Eileen Myles. In 2018, Valparaiso Ediciones in Mexico City will publish a Spanish language edition of Farris’ work, niñosniñas, translated by the acclaimed Mexican writer Pura López-Colomé.

Other book publications include  Morning Ploughs the Winter, (Marick Press, 2012), which was nominated for Griffin International Prize for Literature, “the world’s largest prize for a first edition single collection of poetry.” She is also the translator of Polina Barskova’s This LamentableCity  (Tupelo Press) which was lauded by The New York Times: “Words flicker — strange, elegant — a Russian evanescence. Heat lightning pulses between her lines.” With Ilya Kaminsky and Valzhyna Mort, Farris co-edited Gossip and Metaphysics: Russian Modernist Poems and Prose (Tupelo Press, 2014).

Farris studied midwifery, plant biology, and mycology, and taught philosophy, ocean science, and creative writing at UC Berkeley and Brown University. She was recently Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature at San Diego State University’s M.F.A. program in Creative Writing, where she received a 2012 Award for Innovation in Teaching. As of August 2019 Farris is Associate Professor in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication at Georgia Tech.