Katha Pollitt



Katha Pollitt (born October 14, 1949) is an American feminist poet, essayist and critic. She is the author of four essay collections and two books of poetry. Her writing focuses on political and social issues, including abortion rights, racism, welfare reform, feminism, and poverty.

Professional Life
Pollitt is best known for her bimonthly column "Subject to Debate" in The Nation magazine which The Washington Post called "the best place to go for original thinking on the left." Pollitt has contributed to The Nation since 1980, first serving as editor for the Books & the Arts section before becoming a regular columnist in 1995. She has also published in numerous other periodicals, including The New Yorker, Harper's Magazine, Ms. Magazine, The New York Times, The Atlantic, The New Republic, Glamour, Mother Jones, and the London Review of Books. Her poetry has been republished in many anthologies and magazines, including The New Yorker and The Oxford Book of American Poetry (2006). She has appeared on NPR's Fresh Air and All Things Considered, Charlie Rose, The McLaughlin Group, CNN, Dateline NBC and the BBC.

Much of Pollitt's writing is in defense of contemporary feminism and other forms of 'identity politics' and tackles perceived misimpressions by critics from across the political spectrum; other frequent topics include abortion, the media, U.S. foreign policy, the politics of poverty (especially welfare reform), and human rights movements around the world. Her more controversial writings include "Not Just Bad Sex" (1993), a negative review of Katie Roiphe's The Morning After: Sex, Fear and Feminism on Campus, and "Put Out No Flags" (2001), a Nation essay on post-9/11 America in which she explained her refusal to fly an American flag out of her living room window.

In addition to her writing, Pollitt is a well-known public speaker and has lectured at dozens of colleges and universities, including Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Brooklyn College, UCLA, the University of Mississippi and Cornell. She has taught poetry at Princeton, Barnard and the 92nd Street Y, and women's studies at the New School University. Pollitt is the recipient of several prestigious awards, including the National Magazine Award (1992, 2003), the American Book Award "Lifetime Achievement Award" (2010), and the National Book Critics Circle Award (1983). She has been awarded grants and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Fulbright Program.

Pollitt earned a B.A. in philosophy from Radcliffe College in 1972 and an M.F.A. in writing from Columbia University in 1975. She is currently working on a book about abortion politics.

Books
Pollitt is known equally as well for her poetry as her non-fiction. The New York Review of Books' Cathleen Schine describes Pollitt as "a good old-fashioned feminist and leftist columnist for The Nation, as well as a prize-winning poet." The process of navigating between the political and poetic has been the subject of many interviews, including a noteworthy conversation with Adam Gopnik for Granta in 2009.

Essay Collections
In 1994, Pollitt published Reasonable Creatures: Essays on Women and Feminism (Vintage), a collection of nineteen essays that first appeared in The Nation and other journals. The book's title was a reference to a line in Mary Wollstonecraft's 1794 treatise, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman – "I wish to see women neither heroines nor brutes; but reasonable creatures."

Most of her Nation essays from 1994 to 2001 were collected in Subject to Debate: Sense and Dissents on Women, Politics and Culture, published by the Modern Library in 2001. Booklist reviewed the book favorably in 2001:

"Readers of The Nation depend on their Pollitt fix to stay sane, eagerly reading her zestfully argued, blazingly commonsensical (what a shock good clear thinking can be), and morally precise columns. A master stylist as well as a passionate champion of social justice, Pollitt introduces this powerhouse collection of more than 80 essays spanning the years 1994 through mid-2000 with a bracing overview of the state of feminism and feminism's role in the state, observing that feminism is not a monolithic force, or "plot," but rather a growing resistance against misogyny and the status of second-class citizenry for women by both genders. Adept at picking out the hypocrisy from the rhetoric and intent on voicing sharp, lacerating truths about society, she never misses an opportunity for wit, and her range is extraordinary. Here are incisive and exhilarating essays on women at work, domestic violence, dead-beat dads, panhandlers, school prayer, same-sex marriage, Larry Flynt, and the movie Titanic as "romantic feminism." Every beautifully executed piece is a touchdown, and no silly dances follow."

On June 13, 2006, Random House published her book Virginity or Death!: And Other Social and Political Issues of Our Time, a collection of 84 of her Nation columns. Publisher's Weekly called it, "invariably witty, astute and relentlessly logical...no conservative interested in public debate should ignore so formidable an opponent."

In 2007, Pollitt published Learning to Drive: And Other Life Stories (Random House), a collection of personal essays. Learning to Drive is a departure from her political commentary, covering a range of topics from webstalking a cheating boyfriend to what she learned about her parents using the Freedom of Information Act. The New York Review of Books calls Learning to Drive, “A powerful personal narrative ... full of insight and charm ... Pollitt is her own Jane Austen character ... haughty and modest, moral and irresponsible, sensible and, happily for us, lost in sensibility.”

Poetry
The first book Pollitt published was a collection of poetry called Antarctic Traveler (Knopf, 1982), which received much critical acclaim, including the National Book Critics Circle Award (1983). Critics noted Pollitt's "...poise, her skillful use of language, mature ear for rhythm, and her intellectual and cerebral interpretations. Reviewers credit her with unusual maturity as a poet, praising her ability to contrast romance with disillusionment and her skill at maintaining an objective distance from her subjects."

Her second volume of poetry, The Mind-Body Problem, was published in 2009 and excerpted at Granta. United States Poet Laureate Kay Ryan wrote of The Mind-Body Problem, “It’s awfully good to have such a great-hearted poet as Katha Pollitt take on mortality’s darkest themes. Again and again she finds a human-sized crack of light and squeezes us through with her.”

Childhood
Pollitt was born into a half-Jewish, half-Protestant family in Brooklyn Heights, New York. Her father, Basil Pollitt, was a lawyer who championed liberal causes, and her mother, Leonora Levine, was a real estate agent. Her parents were prolific readers, and they encouraged their only daughter to pursue her interest in poetry.

Pollitt wrote extensively of her family in Learning to Drive, which is dedicated to her parents.  New York Times Sunday Book Reviewer Toni Bentley writes about the discoveries she made in adulthood about her parents:

"Her father, Basil Riddiford Pollitt, a lawyer, was a kind of real-life Communist Atticus Finch, complete with an F.B.I. file about “five inches thick.” People had been informing on him since his high school days, and he lost his scholarship to Harvard as a 17-year-old freshman for “ ‘making communistic speeches and engaging in communistic activities.’ ” As a lawyer he argued that “grand juries were unconstitutional because they systematically excluded blacks and women.” (Decades later, the Supreme Court finally agreed with him.) He sounds like a man who lived up to his wonderful name.

Pollitt’s mother, Leanora Levine Pollitt, was Jewish and also had an F.B.I. file, which revealed that she had had an illegal abortion and had protested against segregated restaurants and Nazi collaborators. She was beautiful and had received nine proposals before marrying Basil, played classical piano, could recite Heine in German, knew what President and Mrs. Roosevelt were doing at any moment of any day and had begun (though did not finish) law school. She had, Pollitt writes, her “dream self,” which included being a journalist and a “fiery revolutionary.” In a poignant legacy, the daughter has manifested the mother’s dream. Beautiful Leanora, however, drank herself to death by the age of 54."

Adult life
On June 6, 1987, she married Randy Cohen, author of the New York Times Magazine column "The Ethicist." They later divorced. They have a daughter, Sophie Pollitt-Cohen (September 25, 1987), author of the bestselling book, The Notebook Girls, written while Pollitt-Cohen was a student at Stuyvesant High School.

On April 29, 2006, Pollitt married the political theorist Steven Lukes. They currently reside in Manhattan.

Awards, Honors, Grants
The Frost Place poet in residence (1977) National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry (for Antarctic Traveler, 1983) National Endowment for the Arts (grant, 1984) Academy of American Poets ("Peter I. B. Lavan Younger Poets Award," 1984) Fulbright Scholarship (1985) Arvon Foundation Prize (1986) New York Foundation for the Arts (1987) John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation (Fellowship, 1987) National Magazine Award (for "Essays and Criticism," 1992) </li> Whiting Foundation Writing Award (1992)</li> Planned Parenthood Federation of America ("Maggie Award," 1993)</li> Freedom from Religion Foundation ("Freethought Heroine Award," 1995)</li> National Women's Political Caucus ("Exceptional Merit Media Award," 2001)</li> National Magazine Award (for "Best Columns and Commentary," 2003)</li> American Book Award ("Lifetime Achievement Award," 2010)</li> The Nation Institute (Puffin Foundation Writing Fellow)</li> Freedom From Religion Foundation (Honorary Board of distinguished achievers 2010) </li>

Criticism
Pollitt was criticized by Bernard Goldberg, who named her number 74 in his book 100 People Who Are Screwing Up America, because of her essay "Put Out No Flags," in which she says: "The flag stands for jingoism and vengeance and war." Goldberg criticized what he perceived to be her lack of patriotism in the time shortly after the September 11th, 2001 attacks.

Pollitt's response, in the Introduction to Virginity or Death!, was "(Memo to self: must try harder.)"

Feminist author Camille Paglia described Pollitt as a "whiny troll, an unscrupulous and unreliable critic and a cultural philistine...She's a good example of the phony prep-school/trust-fund leftism suffusing the incestuously interwined Ivy League cliques who run the corrupt East Coast literary and magazine establishment."