Beatrix Gates

Beatrix Gates is a poet, an essayist, a librettist, and a translator. She is the author of The Burning Key, New & Selected Poems (1973–2023) (Thera Books, 2023); Dos (Finishing Line, 2014); In the Open (Painted Leaf, 1998), a Lambda Poetry Award finalist; and the letterpress chapbook desire lines (Artifact Press, 2020). She received fellowships from MacDowell, Millay Arts, Monson Arts, Ucross, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and the Huntington Library. She received a Maine Arts Commission Poetry Award. Her poems have been published in Beloit Poetry Journal, Cable Street, Poetry Northwest, Ploughshares, Sinister Wisdom, The Kenyon Review, and Tupelo Quarterly and anthologized in Gay & Lesbian Poetry in Our Time (St. Martin’s,1988), The World in Us: Lesbian & Gay Poetry of the Next Wave (St. Martin’s, 2000), and Things Shaped in Passing: More “Poets for Life” Writing from the AIDS Pandemic (Persea, 1995). Gates is also the editor of The Wild Good: Lesbian Photographs & Writings on Love (Anchor, 1996).

Gates shared a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts with composer Anna Dembska as librettist for The Singing Bridge, which premiered at Maine’s Stonington Opera House, and the Witter Bynner Translation Award with Electa Arenal for Jesús Aguado’s The Poems of Vikram Babu (Host, 2009). 

Gates was a finalist for the 2021 Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance nonfiction chapbook award. Hybrid work appears in Jane Cooper: A Radiance of Attention (University of Michigan, 2019); A Woman Like That: Lesbian and Bisexual Writers Tell Their Coming Out Stories (Harper Collins, 2001); and Scotland’s MAP magazine. She exhibited work in "Close Apart: Beatrix Gates, poetry, & Tim Seabrook, etchings,” which spanned her poems from 1973 to 2021; a documentary film by Matt Shaw was commissioned from this work.

Gates founded Granite Press, which ran from 1975–1989 in Penobscot, Maine. The Maine Women Writers Collection at the University of New England houses her papers. Gates has taught writing for 25 years in graduate and undergraduate programs including at the City College of New York, Colby College, Goddard, and New York University as well as in other communities. She earned an MFA at Sarah Lawrence College and a BA at Antioch College. She grew up in Boston and lives in Maine.