Kate Durbin
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, 2014) won praise from both the Poetry Foundation and Flavorwire. Her other books include The Ravenous Audience (Akashic Books, 2009), ABRA (1913 Press), co-created with Amaranth Borsuk, and several chapbooks. ABRA is also an interactive iOS app that won the 2017 international Turn On Literature Prize for electronic literature and an NEA Expanded Artists’ Book Grant from Columbia College Chicago.
Durbin works across video, performance, and web-based art, as well as drawing and painting. Her projects include the performance piece Hello Selfie, which she performed for the Pulse Art Fair in Miami and in Union Square with Transfer Gallery, in Los Angeles with Perform Chinatown, and in Australia with Arts Queensland. Her other work includes the video art/performance piece Unfriend Me Now!, which explores rhetorical wars and political polarization on Facebook and was screened with peer to space in Berlin and shown at the Spring Break Art Fair and FEMMEBIT Festival in Los Angeles, as well as The Supreme Gentleman, about Isla Vista shooter Elliot Rodger's manifesto, which featured on Art21's website and was performed for the #YesAllWomen art benefit in Los Angeles.
In 2015, and again in 2020, Durbin was the Arts Queensland Poet-in-Residence in Brisbane, Australia. Her work has been featured in The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Art in America, Artforum, Document Journal, Flaunt, Poetry, The Believer, XO Jane, Nylon, Casa Vogue, Yale’s American Scholar, NPR’s Morning Edition, The Creators Project, Public Art Dialogue, ArtSlant, Poets & Writers, DAZED, BOMB, Forever, The Baffler, Poets.org, The American Poetry Review, Flavorwire, Best American Experimental Writing, PennSound, The Pulitzer Foundation, and elsewhere.
Durbin has shown her artwork or performed at the Frye Art Museum in Seattle, Pulse Art Fair in Miami, MOCA Los Angeles, SFMOMA, the Spring Break Art Fair in Los Angeles, peer to space in Berlin, the School of Global Art: Down Under, the Poetry Project, the Queensland Poetry Festival, the Ashbery Home School, the Brisbane Writer's Festival, and more. From 2017 to 2018, she was a Digital Studies Fellow with Rutgers-Camden University.
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More Kate Durbin
Text: Read poems by Durbin at Academy of American Poets
Text: Katharine Coldiron interviews Durbin at BOMB
Text/Image: Learn about Durbin's book and digital art app, ABRA