Cate Marvin
Cate Marvin was born in Washington, D.C. in 1969. She received her B.A. from Marlboro
College in Vermont, and hold two M.F.A.s in creative writing, one from the University of
Houston, where she studied poetry; the other from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where
she studied fiction writing. She is now in the final year of completing a Ph.D. in English
at the University of Cincinnati. Her poems have been published in magazines such as the New
England Review, the Paris Review, Fence, and Slate. Her first
book, World’s Tallest Disaster was chosen by Robert Pinsky for the 2000
Kathryn A. Morton Prize and subsequently published by Sarabande Books, Inc. in 2001. World’s
Tallest Disaster received the 2002 Kate Tufts Discovery Award.
Statement of Poetics
In my poems I aim to capture a world that is savage, irreverent, misbehaved, and somewhat
sinister. I am deeply interested in creating tonal oddities by means of syntactical
(re)arrangement. I try to give my poems serious emotional stakes, charged language, and
disparaging humor. Ultimately, I like to think of my poems as vehicles, and, as such, many
are military tanks, while others are steamrollers. None of my poems would ever be mistaken
for a bicycle.
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