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, and for twenty years, she was founder and editor of Poemeleon: A Journal of Poetry. Among the numerous opportunities to come her way, Cati 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, which tells the story of the process of researching her mother's father, Brad Keeler, and his father Rufus B. Keeler, forthcoming from 909 Books in 2027. 

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(Read a more personal bio below.)