katha pollitt
Katha Pollitt writes the "Subject to Debate" column in The Nation and is a reliable voice of sanity, feminism, and humor on the Left. Her essays range in topic from teenage motherhood to the Million Man March to Shakespeare in the canon, and she addresses each topic with wit and eloquence. Her columns and essays have been collected in three books, Reasonable Creatures, Subject to Debate, and Virginity or Death!.
She has won a myriad of prizes and awards for her writing, including two National Magazine Awards, a National Book Critics Circle Award, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Whiting Foundation. Pollitt’s essays have been printed in publications as diverse as The New Yorker, Harper’s, Glamour, Mother Jones, and The New York Times. Born in New York City, she was educated at Harvard University and the Columbia School of the Arts.
Pollitt is also a poet, with two books, Antarctic Traveller, The Mind-Body Problem, and many poems in The New Yorker and other magazines. She has taught at Princeton, Barnard, and the Graduate faculty of the New School, and spoken at dozens of colleges and universities, from the University of Pennsylvania and Yale to St. Benedict's College in Minnesota. Currently, she teaches non-fiction at the Wesleyan Writer’s Conference.
Her fourth essay collection, entitled Learning to Drive: And Other Life Stories, was published by Random House in September of 2007, followed by her most recent book of poetry, The Mind-Body Problem, also published by Random House in Spring of 2009.
For other speakers on war and peace, see: Helen Benedict
For other speakers on feminism and electoral politics, see: Suzanne Braun Levine
For other speakers on abortion and reproductive justice, see: Gloria Steinem, Jennifer Baumgardner, Amy Richards, Wyndi Marie Anderson, Gloria Feldt, Kathy Najimy, Loretta Ross, Third Wave Foundation