Photo credit: Alfred Haymond
Dr. Kate Gale is Co-Founder and Managing Editor of Red Hen Press, Editor of the Los Angeles Review. She teaches in the Low Residency MFA program at the University of Nebraska in Poetry, Fiction and Creative Non-Fiction.
She is the author of seven books of poetry, including The Loneliest Girl, The Goldilocks Zone, Echo Light. Kate has also written six librettos including Rio de Sangre, a libretto for an opera with composer Don Davis, which had its world premiere October 2010 at the Florentine Opera in Milwaukee, WI.
She speaks on independent publishing around the U.S. at schools like USC, Columbia, and Oxford University. Her operas in process include The Web Opera and a piece centered on Che Guevara, featuring Cuban composer Armando Bayolo.
"There are poets and writers who have a personal brand that they are building, and everything they do builds their brand. Kate doesn’t have a brand. Instead, she has a way of walking though the world. Her way of walking is with open hands and heart. She learns from her mistakes. She is open to the universe and every opportunity to be with other writers in community and in the mission of making literary work available as widely as possible.
Kate has been building community since she moved to California in the late Eighties. Because Kate comes from poverty, most of her work goes unacknowledged, and that’s okay. Kate believes in opening doors, in hard work, in planting seeds that will grow for other writers, in diversity, in magic, in water, in light. Kate believes in the possibility that we can learn from our mistakes and do better. Every day is a gift. Every day that we can pick up the pen, write a poem, read a book, find ourselves in the world of story, we should accept with gratitude."
—Afaa Weaver, Guggenheim Fellow and author of A Fire in the Hills