The Burning Key

Beatrix Gates has published six poetry collections, including Dos and Lambda Poetry Award Finalist, In the Open. She has been a fellow at MacDowell, Millay Arts, Monson Arts, the Huntington Library, Ucross, and VCCA, and she received a Maine Arts Commission Poetry Award. Her hybrid work appears in Jane Cooper: A Radiance of Attention. She shared NEA support, as librettist, for The Singing Bridge with composer Anna Dembska, and a Witter Bynner Translation Award with Electa Arenal for Jesús Aguado's The Poems of Vikram Babu. In 2021, "Close Apart: Beatrix Gates, poetry, & Tim Seabrook, etchings," spanning poems from 1973 to 2021, opened Word. Blue Hill Literary Arts Festival at the Cynthia Winings Gallery, and a documentary by Matt Shaw was commissioned on the collaboration with Anahata Foundation support. Gates founded Granite Press (1976-1989) in Penobscot, Maine, as a Book Artist, job printer and feminist small press publisher. She published Grace Paley's Leaning Forward, Joan Larkin's A Long Sound, the bilingual IXOK AMAR.GO, Central American Women Poets for Peace and letterpress editions by Rosa Lane and Jean Valentine. She has taught writing for 25 years in graduate and undergraduate programs, including City College of New York, Colby College, MFA programs at Goddard and NYU, and in many rural and urban community settings. She holds an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College and BA from Antioch College. She grew up in Cambridge, Massachusetts and has had significant time in NYC and San Francisco. She lives in Maine.