Catherine Theis

Catherine Theis was born in New York. Theis is the author of the play Medea (Plays Inverse, 2017), the poetry chapbook The June Cuckold (Convulsive Editions, 2012), and the poetry collection The Fraud of Good Sleep (Salt Publishing, 2011), winner of a 2010 Crashaw Prize. She is the translator of Slashing Sounds (University of Chicago Press, 2024), the first collection of the Italian poet Jolanda Insana to be published in English.

Theis has received various fellowships and awards, most notably from the Illinois Arts Council, Del Amo Foundation, Gold Family Foundation, and the Ugo Da Como Foundation. Theis’s scholarly interests primarily focus on the intersection between translation, poetics, and performance studies; some of this work was published in the collection of essays Classics in Modernist Translation (Bloomsbury, 2019). 

Theis earned an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and a PhD from the University of Southern California. She teaches at USC and lives with her husband, critic and scholar Steven Aaron Minas, in Los Angeles, California.