Katy Bohinc

Katy Bohinc is a poet, publisher, astrologer, data scientist and activist with a background in pure math and comparative literature. She worked for the first human rights organization to exist on Mainland China since Tiananmen Square and subsequently as a data scientist. Her zine, COYDUP, made for hand-to-hand distribution at and around Occupy events is archived with the Occupy Wall Street Poetry Anthology in libraries around the nation.

Bohinc’s poetry is conceptual as well as mystical, challenging conventions of form and assumptions of content. In Dear Alain, her first book, the challenge is a direct address to Alain Badiou from the poet ‘Katya.’  The book asks the question, if the poet is ‘non structure’ and the philosopher is ‘structure,’ then what would a poet say to a philosopher, and could they fall in love? Jamieson Webster described the book as a ‘psycho-sexual Lacanian thriller’ and Slavoj Zizek said it ‘should be banished!’ In 2015 Bohinc performed a reading and response to the book with Alain Badiou in New York City. The erotopsychmachia between poet and philosopher can be seen here.

Since 2014, Bohinc has served as Director of the award-winning Tender Buttons Press, an independent poetry press dedicated to experimental women’s literature. She has edited two volumes of poetry: Please Add To This List: A Guide to Teaching Bernadette Mayer’s Sonnets and Experiments and Tender Omnibus: The First Twenty Five Years of Tender Buttons Press.

In Trinity Star Trinity, a long poem about the divine feminine dedicated to Hera, Bohinc reclaims the ancient form of the ode or chant in an Oulipian mathematical reinvention focused on taking faith and the trinity to an expanded dimension: three cubed, or 27 poems of 27 words each.