Kate Polak
Kate Polak is a scholar, writer, and artist whose work focuses on poetry and comics, particularly affect theory and cognitive approaches Her first book, (Ohio State University Press), was nominated for an Eisner Award. Forthcoming in fall of 2024 is (Liverpool University Press), an exploration of the intersections between historical fiction and speculative fiction and was co-edited with Dr. Ian MacDonald.
Her recent research has been focused on the intersections between comics and poetry. Her current scholarship argues how concepts from poetics can be applied to graphic narratives in the developing monograph The Poetics of Comics. She has also been intermittently working on a longer project analyzing Holocaust and genocide memorialization in the digital age.
She has been writing and drawing a graphic memoir tentatively entitled Just Okay, which explores the intersections between teenaged girlhood and the racial politics in Cincinnati, Ohio in the 1990s. Her poetry has recently appeared in DIAGRAM, Miracle Monocle, 惭肠厂飞别别苍别测鈥檚, Drunk Monkeys, Moria, Inverted Syntax, and elsewhere. She has three collections of poetry in the works: Never Couldn鈥檛 Be, Trickster Gods of Appalachia, and Cathouse.