Catina Bacote is a nonfiction writer from New Haven, Connecticut, and her current book project chronicles the lasting impact of the illegal drug trade on families and communities. 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

• “On Being Black and Afraid,” Fourth Genre 25.2, (Forthcoming 2024)
• “My Brother Speaks: That's The Way We're Gonna Survive,” Black Warrior Review, (June 2023)
• “The Funk of Defiance, The Freedom of Refusal,” Bending Genre: Essays on Creative Nonfiction, Second Edition, ed. Margot Singer and Nicole Walker, (Bloomsbury Press, January 2023).
• “Heavy Lifting,” The Offing, Fall 2021.
• “Eighty-Three Questions about the Death of De’Shon Wilson: An Ongoing Investigation,” Gulf Coast: A Journal of Literature of Fine Arts, Online Exclusive, Summer/Fall 2020.
• “A World of Tangled Vines, Falling Berries, Bruised Grapes, Rough Rinds, and Ripening Flesh,” Prairie Schooner, Volume 94, No. 3, (Fall 2020): 45-47.
• “What A Human Needs,” Kweli Journal, August 31, 2020.
• “Up North,” December Magazine, Volume 30.1, (Spring/Summer 2019): 29-45.    
• “The Other America,” Ploughshares, February 2018.
• “We Carried Ourselves Like Villagers,” This Is the Place: Women Writing About Home Anthology, ed. Margot Case Kahn and Kelly McMasters, (Seal Press, November 2017), 305-313.
• “Writing into the World: Memoir, History and Private Life,” TriQuarterly, Issue 148, Summer/Fall 2015.
• “Hope,” The Gettysburg Review, Volume 27, Number 1, (Spring 2014): 66-72.
• “Fear,” The Southern California Review, Volume VII, 2014
• “In Court,” The Common, October 2013

• Mellon Arts and Practitioner Fellow, Yale Center for the Study of Race, Indigeneity, and Transnational Migration, 2024
• Trillium Arts Residency, 2023
• UCROSS Residency, 2023
• MacDowell Residency, 2022
• Jerome Hill Artist Fellowship, 2021
• American Association of University Women Fellowship, 2021
• Blue Mountain Center Residency, 2021
• Summer Support of Research Grant, St. John’s University, 2019
• Inclusive Teaching and Learning Grant, Academic Center for Equity and Inclusion, St. John’s University, 2019
• Djerassi Residency, 2018
• Willapa Bay Residency, 2018
• Alice Judson Hayes Social Justice Writing Fellowship, Ragdale Foundation, 2017
• Hedgebrook Residency, 2017
• Headlands Center for the Arts Residency, 2017
• MacDowell Residency, 2015
• The University of Iowa Provost's Visiting Writer Fellowship, 2014
• Millay Colony Residency, 2014
• Deans Graduate Research Fellowship, The University of Iowa, 2011