Joy Katz was born in Newark, N.J., in 1963 and was raised in Buffalo, N.Y., Philadelphia, a small town in Maine, and Cincinnati.

She holds a B.S. in industrial design from Ohio State University and worked designing corporate annual reports before pursuing poetry. She received an M.F.A. from Washington University in St. Louis and afterward held a Stegner Fellowship at Stanford.

Katz's poetry appears in numerous journals including Ploughshares, Conduit, Barrow Street, Colorado Review, Court Green, and Verse and is anthologized in The Best American Poetry, The New Young American Poets, and The Autumn House Anthology of Contemporary Poetry. Her book reviews have appeared in Slope, The New York Times Book Review, Parnassus, and other publications.

She is a senior editor at Pleiades and co-editor of the forthcoming anthology Dark Horses: Poets on Lost Poems. She teaches poetry workshops at The New School and lives in Brooklyn with her husband Rob Handel, a playwright, and their small dachshund.

The Garden Room won the 2005 Tupelo Press Snowbound Chapbook Prize, and was also a runner-up for the 2005 Center for Book Arts chapbook prize.

Her first book, Fabulae, was a finalist for the ForeWord Book of the Year and the Colorado Prize.