Katha Pollitt

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Katha Pollitt
Katha Pollitt

Katha Pollitt (born October 14, 1949 in New York City) is an American feminist poet, essayist and critic.

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[edit] Writing

Pollitt is best-known for her column "Subject to Debate" in The Nation magazine, but has also published in numerous other periodicals, including The New Yorker, Harper's Magazine, Ms. magazine and The New York Times. In 1994, she published Reasonable Creatures: Essays on Women and Feminism, a collection of nineteen essays that appeared in The Nation and in other journals. 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 Modern Library. Before she became a regular columnist for The Nation, Pollitt edited its Books & the Arts section, and won a National Book Critics Circle Award for a volume of her poetry, Antarctic Traveller, in 1983. On June 13, 2006, Random House published her book, Virginity or Death!: And Other Social and Political Issues of Our Time.

Much of Pollitt's writing is in defense of contemporary feminism and other forms of "identity politics," against perceived misimpressions by critics from all over 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 her living room window.

[edit] Personal

Pollitt married Randy Cohen, author of The New York Times Magazine column "The Ethicist," on June 6, 1987.[1] They later divorced. They have a daughter, Sophie Pollitt-Cohen. On April 29, 2006, Pollitt married the political theorist Steven Lukes.[2]

Pollitt received an A.B. in philosophy from Radcliffe College in 1972 and an M.F.A. in writing from Columbia University in 1975.[3]

[edit] 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."[1]

[edit] Bibliography

  • Antarctic Traveller: Poems (1982) (ISBN 0394748956)
  • Reasonable Creatures: Essays on Women and Feminism (1995) (ISBN 0679762787)
  • Subject to Debate: Sense and Dissents on Women, Politics, and Culture (2001) (ISBN 0679783431)
  • Virginity or Death!: And Other Social and Political Issues of Our Time (2006) (ISBN 081297638X)
  • Learning to Drive: And Other Life Stories (2007) (ISBN 1400063329)

[edit] External links

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