top of page

About -
         Cate Lycurgus   

Helene Simkin JaraI have been writing since the 3rd grade when I wrote a book and gave it to a teacher who I thought hated me. I hoped if I gave her that book, she would be nice to me. It didn’t work. I guess I have ADHD of writing because I write short stories, poems, plays and non-fiction. Being in a writing group where we take turns giving a prompt each week helps me gather many short stories. They are often, but not always a tad autobiographical. My memoir, Life on the Stand, was written when I was very bored living in Monterey. I thought hearing about being an artist model in the seventies would be at the very least amusing. The book True Doll stories emanated from watching my ex-mother-in-law comb a blonde Barbie on my back porch. To me she was a beautiful, round, brown Mexican women who had stiff legs like the Barbie she was about to make a new dress for and sell for 5 pesos in the flea market in Guadalajara. I interviewed her about her life. I then got the idea to interview men and women about their childhood experiences with dolls. Their stories just poured out of them and onto a page or two in my book. I am motivated to give people a voice who might otherwise not have ever been given the chance to tell their story.

Bio

Cate Lycurgus is a writer and educator deeply invested in the ways language can spark discovery, create connection, and cultivate care. As a native Californian and long-term caregiver, Cate writes deeply sonic work, always in pursuit of light—paying close attention not only to what is dire, but the glimmer inside it.


She is the author of Seacliff (Bull City Press, 2025) and her work has appeared in Best American Poetry, The American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, ZYZZYVA, Kenyon Review, Orion, and elsewhere. Cate lives in San Jose, California, where she interviews for 32 Poems, co-curates the Headwaters Reading Series for Health and Wellbeing, and teaches writing

About the book

Anchored by a vivid and resounding sequence, Seacliff enacts the relentless crash and dissolution of our bodies, landscapes, and spirits, even as they are recombined to return. And so this book serves as a reminder of the primeval rhythm that sustains us. Unlike other works, this seascape impels a meditation that is not merely metaphorical. In the face of very real forces, the uncertainty is not whether one must surrender, but when and how. This testament of perseverance invites us to submit to – and to celebrate – the vast vigor of our planet. Here, alongside the Northern California coast, Seacliff offers a path, one lyric runner of shine, out to a fresh horizon.

bottom of page