Vasiliki Katsarou grew up Greek American in Jack Kerouac’s hometown of Lowell, Massachusetts. She has also lived in Paris, France, and Harvard, Mass.
A Geraldine R. Dodge poet who read in the 2014 Dodge Poetry Festival, Vasiliki is also an independent curator, sometime filmmaker, and a teaching artist at New Jersey's Hunterdon Art Museum. She holds a BA in comparative literature magna cum laude from Harvard University and an MFA with distinction from Boston University.
She is the author of a full-length poetry collection, Memento Tsunami, and two chapbooks, Three Sea Stones (Lucia Press, 2020) and The Second Home (Finishing Line Press, 2023). She is also the editor of two contemporary poetry anthologies: Eating Her Wedding Dress: A Collection of Clothing Poems (with Ellen Foos and Ruth Zamoyta) and Dark as a Hazel Eye: Coffee & Chocolate Poems (with Lynne Shapiro and Ellen Foos).
Her poetry has been published widely and internationally, including in NOON: Journal of the Short Poem (Japan), Corbel Stone Press’ Contemporary Poetry Series (U.K.), Regime Journal (Australia), Mediterranean Poetry (Denmark), and Mandragoras (in Greek translation). Poems have also appeared in Otoliths, Poetry Daily, Tiferet: A Journal of Spiritual Literature, Wild River Review, wicked alice, Literary Mama, La Vague Journal, and Contemporary American Voices. Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. One of her poems has been archived in the permanent collection of the Smithsonian. A number of her poems were also featured in an art installation at the New Jersey contemporary art center ArtYard.
She has been a teaching artist at New Jersey's Hunterdon Art Museum since 2014, and has created cross-disciplinary public programs and literary events for many arts organizations in New Jersey including for Flemington Borough’s commemoration of the 300th Anniversary of Hunterdon County, for Clinton Borough’s 150th Anniversary, along with the Hopewell Theater, ArtYard, Panoply Books, Ellarslie Museum Trenton, and Frenchtown Bookshop.
Her award-winning 35mm short film, Fruitlands 1843, about a Transcendentalist utopian community in Massachusetts, was re-released in 2024. She has also written on film for LENSES and DIRECTED BY WOMEN.
Vasiliki co-founded Solitude Hill Press, whose debut publication is the well-received poetry collection Gala by Lynne Shapiro, about art muses, surrealism and the art world.
