Katha Pollitt is well known for her wit and her keen sense of both the
ridiculous and the sublime. Her "Subject to Debate" column, which The
Washington Post called "the best place to go for original thinking on
the left," appears every other week in The Nation; it is
frequently reprinted in newspapers across the country. In 2003,
"Subject to Debate" won the National Magazine Award for Columns and
Commentary.
Pollitt has been contributing to The Nation since 1980. Her 1992
essay on the culture wars, "Why We Read: Canon to the Right of Me..."
won the National Magazine Award for essays and criticism, and she won
the Whiting Foundation Writing Award the same year. In 1993 her essay
"Why Do We Romanticize the Fetus?" won the Maggie Award from the Planned
Parenthood Federation of America.
Many of Pollitt's contributions to The Nation are compiled in
three books: Reasonable Creatures: Essays on Women and Feminism
(Knopf); Subject to Debate: Sense and Dissents on Women, Politics,
and Culture (Modern Library); and Virginity or Death! And Other
Social and Political Issues of Our Time (Random House). In
September, Random House will publish her collection of personal essays,
Learning to Drive and Other Life Stories. Two pieces from this
book, "Learning to Drive" and its followup, "Webstalker," originally
appeared in The New Yorker. "Learning to Drive" is anthologized
in Best American Essays 2003.
Pollitt has also written essays and book reviews for The New
Yorker, The Atlantic, The New Republic,
Harper's, Ms., Glamour, Mother Jones, The
New York Times, and the London Review of Books. She has
appeared on NPR's Fresh Air and All Things Considered, Charlie Rose, The
McLaughlin Group, CNN, Dateline NBC and the BBC. Her work has been
republished in many anthologies and is taught in many university
classes.
For her poetry, Pollitt has received a National Endowment for the Arts
grant and a Guggenheim Fellowship. Her 1982 book Antarctic
Traveller won the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her poems have
been published in many magazines and are reprinted in many anthologies,
most recently The Oxford Book of American Poetry (2006).
Born in New York City, she was educated at Harvard and the Columbia
School of the Arts. She has lectured at dozens of colleges and
universities, including Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Brooklyn College,
UCLA, the University of Mississippi, and Cornell. She has taught poetry
at Princeton and the 92nd Street Y, and women's studies at the New
School University.
Visit www.kathapollitt.com for upcoming appearances, interviews and
more.
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