Kate Gale
- Fiction, Creative Nonfiction, and Poetry Mentor
- MFA in Writing
Additional Information
Biography
Dr. KATE GALE is Managing Editor of Red Hen Press, Editor of the Los Angeles Review and President of the American Composers Forum, LA. She teaches in the Low Residency MFA program at the University of Nebraska in Poetry, Fiction and Creative Nonfiction. She serves on the boards of A Room of Her Own Foundation, Kore Press and Poetry Society of America. She is author of five books of poetry and six librettos including Rio de Sangre, a libretto for an opera with composer Don Davis which had its world premiere October 2010 at the Florentine Opera in Milwaukee. Her current projects include a co-written libretto, Paradises Lost with Ursula K. LeGuin and composer Stephen Taylor, and a libretto based on The Inner Circle by T. C. Boyle, based on Dr. Kinsey’s life with composer Daniel Felsenfeld which is in production in 2014 by the American Opera Projects. Her newest books are The Goldilocks Zone from the University of Nebraska Press in January 2014 and Echo Light from Red Mountain Press fall of 2014. It won the Red Mountain Press Editor Choice Award. Articles, poems and fiction published in various literary journals and magazines, including: Arshile, Bakunin, The Brownstone Review, Chattahoochee Review, Clackmas Literary Review, The Forum, Inside English, Northeast Journal, Paterson Literary Review, Quarterly West, Poems & Plays and Salmon. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband and children.
Teaching Philosophy
"I believe in stretching out into the world of stories and ideas and listening. We all do too much talking as teachers and students; we play with our devices and we talk. What we need to do is get quiet and listen to the stories and then write. Ideally, we as teachers can help students get out of the way of the noise and find a way to make those stories sing, to abbreviate the parts of the story that are over-written, to tighten the story until its pacing is tight, its language crisp and its plot like blues music, thick and entangled. The purpose of the teacher is to walk along with a torch. You already know the way. That’s the writing and editing part as I see it. I like to think that the writer has painted a story on cave walls, and I am going through and seeing what was drawn there—of heroes and dragons, of darkness and sorcery, and I find the greatness and help the writer get rid of the dross. We partner to make something that will make future generations wonder who lived here."
