Cati Porter is the author of eleven poetry books and chapbooks, most recently small mammals, The Body at a Loss , and Novel. She is a California Arts Council Region 1 2023-24 Individual Artist Fellow. She has won or placed in poetry prizes from So To Speak, Gravity & Light, Crab Creek Review, The Holden Spangler Award, and been a finalist for numerous poetry collection competitions, including Two Sylvia's Press The Wilder Prize in 2021 for her book, small mammals, later published by Mayapple Press.

Cati Porter's poems can be found in the anthologies White Ink: Poems on Mothers and Motherhood, Letters to the World: Poems from the WomPo Listserv, Like a Fat Gold Watch, and Places We Return To, and the journals Terrain, Rattle, Pratik, Verse Daily, Autumn Sky Poetry Daily, West Trestle Review, and you can find a few of her essays in Salon, The Manifest-Station, and Shark Reef Literary Magazine. Since 2013, Cati Porter has been a contributing columnist for the Inlandia Literary Journeys series, published by the Southern California Newsgroup.

For twelve years, she was executive director of Inlandia Institute, a regionally-focused literary arts nonprofit and publishing house. During her tenure with Inlandia, Cati Porter built their independent publishing program from the ground up, expanded their partnerships with organizations throughout Southern California, and elevated Inlandia's visibility on a national scale.   

For twenty years, she was founder and editor of Poemeleon: A Journal of Poetry, publishing twenty stand-alone issues and featuring nearly 1000 individual poets and writers. The journal published many notables including Chen Chen, Diane Seuss, Major Jackson, Bob Hicok, and Sherman Alexie. 

Among the numerous opportunities to come her way, Cati Porter has been able to serve as a judge for the California Arts Council's regional and state-level Poetry Out Loud competitions, taught medical professionals about the healing power of poetry through CavanKerry Press at Rutgers Medical School, and taught high school educators how to teach to poetry through the Riverside County Office of Education.

Her current project is a hybrid memoir, Clay Bodies, about herself and her mother and her mother's father Brad Keeler, and grandfather Rufus B. Keeler, forthcoming from 909 Books in 2027. The two men were prominent in the California Pottery Movement of the early 20th Century.

(Read a more personal bio below.)