Biography
Karen Chase lives in The Berkshire Hills of Western Massachusetts. Her poems, stories and essays have appeared in many magazines, including The Gettysburg Review, The New Yorker, The New Republic and Southwest Review. Her book of poems, Kazimierz Square, was short-listed by Foreword Magazine as "Best Indie Poetry Book of 2000." Land of Stone, her non-fiction book about her work as Poet-in-Residence at a psychiatric hospital, won a Bronze medal in the 2008 Independent Publishers Book Awards. About Bear, her second collection of poems, Harvard Review says “Karen Chase’s poems are buoyed by lightness and vitality, a joy in physical pleasures, and an imitable sense of humor.” Her book-length homoerotic poem, Jamali-Kamali, was released in the summer of 2011. Polio Boulevard, a work of non-fiction, is forthcoming from SUNY University Press in 2014.
Her work has been widely anthologized, including poems in The Norton Introduction To Poetry, The Norton Introduction To Literature, Poetry 180: A Turning Back To Poetry edited by Billy Collins, Yellow Silk: Erotic Arts and Letters, The Second Set: The Jazz Poetry Anthology edited by Yusef Komunyakaa and Sascha Feinstein, and Thus Spake The Corpse: An Exquisite Corpse Reader, 1988-1998 Volume 1 edited by Andrei Codrescu. Her story The Resurrections of Isaac Bashevis Singer received a citation as one of the "100 Distinguished Stories of 1993" in Best American Short Stories. Her essay Learning to Shoot received a citation in Best American Essays 2006.
Among her honors, she has been a Fellow at The MacDowell Colony, The Sanskriti Foundation, and at The Rockefeller Foundation's Bellagio Center. She has been the recipient of numerous grants, including several from the Witter Bynner Foundation for Poetry and The Rockefeller Foundation. For over a decade, Chase was the Poet-in-Residence at New York Hospital-Cornell Medical Center, teaching poetry writing to severely disturbed psychiatric patients and doing research. From 1991 until 2004, she ran the Camel River Writing Center and has served on the resident faculty of The Robert Frost Place in Franconia, New Hampshire. She now serves as a trustee of The Amy Clampitt Fund, whose mission is to benefit poetry and the literary arts.
