Cate Marvin

Cate Marvin was born in Washington, D.C. and raised in Potomac, Maryland. She received her B.A. from Marlboro College in Vermont in 1993. She holds two M.F.A.s, one from the University of Houston in Poetry (1997), the other from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in Fiction (1999). She went on to complete her Ph.D. in English and Comparative Literature at the University of Cincinnati in 2003. Marvin’s first book, ​​​​​​​World’s Tallest Disaster, was chosen by Robert Pinsky for the 2000 Kathryn A. Morton Prize. In 2002, she received the Kate Tufts Discovery Prize. She co-edited with poet Michael Dumanis the anthology Legitimate Dangers: American Poets of the New Century. Her second book of poems, Fragment of the Head of a Queen, for which she received a Whiting Award, was published in 2007. Her third book of poems, Oracle, was named by The New York Times as one of “The Best Poetry Books of 2015.” Her latest book, Event Horizon, was published in 2022. Marvin teaches poetry writing in the Stonecoast M.F.A. Program at the University of Southern Maine and is Professor of English at the College of Staten Island, City University of New York. A recent Guggenheim Fellow, she lives in Scarborough, Maine.