The Poetry and Politics of Allen Ginsberg (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9780993409905)

Eliot Katz is the author of seven books of poetry, including Unlocking the Exits (1999) and Love, War, Fire, Wind: Looking Out from North America's Skull (2009). His first full-length poetry book, Space and Other Poems for Love, Laughs, and Social Transformation was published in 1990, with introductions by Allen Ginsberg and Amiri Baraka, and a front cover drawing by Leon Golub. Katz is also the author of two prose e-books, Three Radical Poets: Tributes to Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, and Adrienne Rich (2013) and The Moonlight of Home and Other Stories of Truth and Fiction (2013). He was a coeditor, with Allen Ginsberg and Andy Clausen, of Poems for the Nation (2000), a collection of contemporary political poems that Ginsberg was compiling in the 18 months before his death in 1997. A cofounder, with Danny Shot, and former coeditor of Long Shot literary journal, he guest-edited Long Shot's final issue, a "Beat Bush issue" released in Spring 2004. Katz's poems are included in the anthologies: Poetry After 9/11: An Anthology of New York Poets; Blood to Remember: American Poets on the Holocaust, 2nd ed.; The World the 60s Made: Politics and Culture in Recent America; Aloud: Voices from the Nuyorican Poets Cafe; Blue Stones and Salt Hay: An Anthology of Contemporary New Jersey Poets; Identity Lessons: Contemporary Writing About Learning to Be American; Bum Rush the Page: A Def Poetry Jam; Confronting Capitalism: Dispatches from a Global Movement; and In Defense of Mumia. His long essay, "Radical Eyes: Political Poetics and 'Howl'," is included in the prose collection, The Poem That Changed America: "Howl" Fifty Years Later. Of his piece in that collection, the San Francisco Chronicle's reviewer, Allan Jalon, wrote that Katz's essay "gives the book its intellectual core." Katz is also coeditor of a bilingual poetry anthology published in France in 1997, entitled Changing America: Contemporary U.S. Poems of Protest, 1980-1995. A one-time student (Naropa Institute, 1980) and a longtime friend of Allen Ginsberg's, Ginsberg called Katz "another classic New Jersey bard." Currently living in Hoboken, New Jersey, Katz has worked for many years as an activist for a wide range of peace and social-justice causes, including a decade spent as an advocate for Central New Jersey homeless families, during which he helped create several housing and food programs that remain ongoing.