Karen Chase writes poems, stories, and essays that have appeared in many magazines, including The Gettysburg Review, The New Yorker, The New Republic and Southwest Review. She is the author of two poetry collections, Kazimierz Square and BEAR, as well as Jamali-Kamali, a book-length homoerotic poem that takes place in Mughal, India. Her book, Land of Stone, tells the story of her work with a silent young man in a psychiatric hospital where she was the hospital poet. Polio Boulevard, a memoir, came out in 2014. FDR on His Houseboat: The Larocco Log, 1924-1926 was published in 2016. Chase’s work has been widely anthologized, including poems in The Norton Introduction to Poetry, Thus Spake The Corpse: An Exquisite Corpse Reader edited by Andrei Codrescu, and Poetry 180 edited by Billy Collins.
She was the Visiting Writer at the FDR Homestead, and a Fellow at MacDowell, The Sanskriti Foundation, and The Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center. Chase has been the recipient of numerous grants, including several from the Witter Bynner Foundation for Poetry and The Rockefeller Foundation. For over a decade, she was the Poet-in-Residence at New York Hospital-Cornell Medical Center, teaching poetry writing to severely disturbed psychiatric patients. She then founded and ran the Camel River Writing Center and has twice served on the resident faculty of The Robert Frost Place. Currently, she is a trustee of The Amy Clampitt Fund, whose mission is to benefit poetry and the literary arts.
