He is the translator of The Score of the Game and An Offshoot of Sense (Tatiana Shcherbina); Say Thank You and Level with Us (Mikhail Aizenberg); When a Poet Sees a Chestnut Tree, Secret Wars, and I Have Invented Nothing (Jean-Pierre Rosnay); Corinthian Copper (Regina Derieva); Live by Fire (Aleksey Porvin); Thirty-nine Rooms (Nikolai Baitov); Psalms (Genrikh Sapgir); Muddy River (Sergey Stratanovsky); Selected Poems 1957-2009, and Sixty Years (Mikhail Yeryomin); and Paper-thin Skin (Aigerim Tazhi).
Since 1997, with Leora Zeitlin, Kates has co-directed Zephyr Press, a non-profit literary publishing house that focuses on contemporary works in translation from Russia, Eastern Europe, and Asia.
He volunteered for the Mississippi Summer Project after his freshman year at Wesleyan University in 1964, helping to implement a special court order encouraging voter registration in Panola County.
In the fall of 1964, he organized a Friends of the SNCC/COFO in Paris, France, to support the work of the American civil rights movement.
He later became a public school teacher, a non-violence trainer for interpersonal and political movements, and a poet and literary translator.