Catina Bacote is a nonfiction writer from New Haven, Connecticut. Her book project chronicling the lasting impact of the illegal drug trade on families and communities will be published by Holt in 2026. She is a 2024 Mellon Arts and Practitioner Fellow at the Yale Center for the Study of Race, Indignity, and Transnational Migration. Among other honors, Bacote has received fellowships from the Jerome Foundation and the American Association of University Women. Her essays have appeared in the anthologies This Is the Place: Women Writing About Home (Seal Press, 2017) and Bending Genre: Essays on Creative Nonfiction (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2023), as well as in the journals Ploughshares, Tin House, Gettysburg Review, TriQuarterly, Gulf Coast, Prairie Schooner, Black Warrior Review, Fourth Genre, and elsewhere. Her work has been supported by writing residencies such as Hedgebrook, MacDowell, Blue Mountain, Headlands Center for the Arts, UCROSS, Djerassi, and Ragdale, where she received the Alice Judson Hayes Social Justice Fellowship. In her creative writing and literature courses, she invites students to investigate their deepest concerns and curiosities and use their moral imaginations to engage with the world around them. Recently, she spoke on the panel “Pedagogies of Play and Pleasure in the Creative Writing Classroom” and previously moderated “Teaching Toward Justice: Student Voice and Power in Creative Writing” for the Bedell Nonfiction Now Conference in Wellington, New Zealand.

curriculum vitae