Katy Lederer is the author of the poetry collections Winter Sex (Verse), The Heaven-Sent Leaf (BOA Editions), and The bright red horse—and the blue (Atelos), as well as the memoir Poker Face: A Girlhood Among Gamblers (Crown), which was a New York Times Book Review "Editor's Choice" and one of Esquire's eight "Best Books of the Year." She has been featured in The New Yorker's "Talk of the Town," the New York Times's DealBook section, and on NPR's Marketplace and To The Best of Our Knowledge, among other venues. Her poetry, essays, and reviews have been published in a diverse array of magazines including The Paris Review, The Enemy, The American Poetry Review, A Public Space, and Poetry London.
In her writing, work, and activism, Lederer focuses on the intersection between feeling and analysis, passion and data, and excess and traditional form. She counts among her primary influences the works of Edith Wharton, John Kenneth Galbraith, Lyn Hejinian, Georges Bataille, Susan Sontag, Sylvia Plath, Octavia Butler, Michel Houellebecq, and Rebecca Solnit — these are the authors she can't get enough of.
At MacDowell, Lederer worked on a collection of poetry titled The Engineers on the topics of genetics, autoimmunity, deformity, and motherhood, and a book-length science fictional sonnet sequence titled Polar Bodies that takes place inside the sun.
