Kate Durbin is a writer and artist from Los Angeles, California. She is the author of four books of poetry. Hoarders (Wave Books) was named a best book of 2021 by NPR, Lit Hub, and Electric Literature. E! Entertainment (Wonder) was called “highly original” by Poetry Foundation and “probably a work of genius” by Flavorwire. Her other books include The Ravenous Audience (Akashic Books), and ABRA (1913 Press).
ABRA is also an iOS app that is "a living text.” It won the 2017 international Turn On Literature Prize for electronic literature, and an NEA Expanded Artists’ Book Grant from Columbia College Chicago. In 2015, and again in 2020, Kate was the Arts Queensland Poet-in-Residence in Brisbane, Australia.
Kate has shown her artwork nationally and internationally. Her performances and video work include Hello Selfie, which she performed for the Pulse Art Fair in Miami with Transfer Gallery, in Union Square with Transfer Gallery, in Los Angeles with Perform Chinatown, and with Arts Queensland in Australia. Other recent work includes Unfriend Me Now!, about Facebook, screened with Peer to Space in Berlin and shown at the Spring Break Art Fair and Femmebit Art Festival in Los Angeles; and The Supreme Gentleman, about Isla Vista shooter Elliot Rodger, featured on Art 21's website and performed for the Yes All Women Art Benefit and Auction in Los Angeles.
Kate's work has been featured in The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Art in America, Art Forum, Document Journal, Flaunt, Poetry, The Believer, XO Jane, Nylon, Casa Vogue, Yale's American Scholar, NPR’s Morning Edition, The Creator's Project, Public Art Dialogue, ArtSlant, Poets and Writers, DAZED, BOMB, poets.org, The American Poetry Review, Flavorwire, Best American Experimental Writing, PennSound, The Pulitzer Foundation, Flaunt, Poetry, and elsewhere. She has shown her work or performed at The Frye Museum, The Pulse Art Fair, MOCA Los Angeles, SF MOMA, The Spring Break Art Fair in Los Angeles, Peer to Space in Berlin, The School for Global Art Down Under, The Poetry Project, The Queensland Poetry Festival, The Ashbery Home School, The Brisbane Writer's Festival, and more. In 2017-2018 she was a Digital Studies fellow with Rutgers-Camden University.
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