Photo by: John Kingston

Kate Braverman (February 5, 1949 – October 12, 2019) was a poet and experimental writer of a singular and ruthless breed. Born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, she moved to Los Angeles in 1958 with her family. She graduated from the University of California at Berkeley (1971) and earned a M.A in English from Sonoma State University (1986).

Her literary career spanned decades, beginning with the poetry collection Milk Run (1977). She gained acclaim with her debut novel, Lithium for Medea (1979). Other novels include Palm Latitudes (1988), Wonders of the West (1993), and The Incantation of Frida K (2001). Her notable short story collections include Squandering the Blue (1990), Small Craft Warnings (1998), and her final work, A Good Day for Seppuku (2018).

Braverman's accomplishments were recognized with multiple honors, including winning the O. Henry Prize and the Raymond Carver Editor's Choice Award. Her short fiction was selected for the Best American Short Stories anthology on multiple occasions. She was also the first recipient of the Graywolf Press Creative Nonfiction Award for her memoir, Frantic Transmissions to and from Los Angeles: An Accidental Memoir (2006).

"I'd like to be remembered as someone who attacked the borders of language, who feminized it and tropicalized it and proved it is fluid. I'm not impressed where men have set the borders of the novel and the short story - codifying, repeating and bowing to the forms. I would like to be remembered as someone who assaulted the borders, as someone who muddied the borders with her high heels." -- Kate Braverman, 1993.

"The power and intensity you don’t see much outside of rock and roll." — Rolling Stone

"Braverman possesses a magical, incantatory voice and the ability to loft ordinary lives into the heightened world of myth, and in using these gifts . . . she has succeeded in creating a work of hallucinatory, poetic power."—The New York Times

Milk Run turns 50!

Kate's first book of poems Milk Run published January 1, 1977
by Momentum Press turned 50 this year.

Read: A Poet Recalls Her Youth

"I was writing my first poetry, my first of what would be the Milk Run poems. I read “Cobalt Blue” and everybody stood up and cheered. They didn’t just applaud enthusiastically. It was utterly kinetic. I could feel the room change temperature and I could feel trees in forests on other planets catch on fire.....That night at Beyond Baroque was my christening. Every one was clapping, they were cheering, and I felt my whole life was just beginning." - Kate Braverman 2008

"That Braverman is gifted, even prodigiously so, there is no doubt . . . her fiction is distinguished by the purity of language and boldness of imagery that seem to be the private stock of poets." — The Los Angeles Times

“If, as they say, beauty is in the eye of the beholder, it stands to reason that horror, too, lurks deep within the optic nerve. How else to explain the lushly menacing imagery in the poet and novelist Kate Braverman’s latest book?” –The New York Times

Page updated

Google Sites

Report abuse