Joel Thomas Katz
Current City, State, Country
Birth City, State, Country
Biography
Poet and translator Joel Thomas Katz lives in Palo Alto, California. His poems have appeared in various literary journals, including Sand Hill Review, The Montserrat Review, West Wind Review, Disquieting Muses Quarterly, Spillway and Red Wheelbarrow. His latest book of poems Erase | Endure was published by Dutch Poet Press in March 2020. Joel’s deep interest in translation has led him to work together with colleague Robert Perry in translating poems by the contemporary Dutch poets Ingmar Heytze and Saskia Stehouwer. An initial selection of Heytze/Stehouwer poems, together with translator essays, appeared in 2017 in a bilingual format: iets anders | something else (Dutch Poet Press). And in 2019 Joel, Robert and Saskia Stehouwer co-translated her new volume of eco-poetry into English with a bilingual format: Vrije uitloop | Free range (Dutch Poet Press). Joel has also translated several poems by contemporary Israeli poet Rafi Weichert (unpublished).
Joel is a member of the (San Francisco) Bay Area Literary Translators Working Group (BALTWG). His poetic interests include Midrash, cultural identity and family, traditional and contemporary Jewish texts, and the art of translation.
Published Works
Poetry
Erase | Endure (Dutch Poet Press, 2020)
Away (Mayapple Press, 2008)
Translations
Vrije uitloop | Free range; eco-poetry of Dutch poet Saskia Stehouwer, trans. by Joel Thomas Katz, Robert Perry and Saskia Stehouwer (Dutch Poet Press, 2019)
iets anders | something else; selections of contemporary Dutch poetry by Ingmar Heytze and Saskia Stehouwer, trans. by Joel Thomas Katz and Robert Perry (Dutch Poet Press, 2017)
Author Site
Links to Sample Works
Video Reading
Education
University of Pennsylvania, B.A.
Stanford University, M.A.