Richard Katrovas is the founding director of the Prague Summer Program for Writers[1] and the author of eight books of poetry, two novels, two collections of stories and three memoirs.
Born November 4, 1953, in Norfolk, Virginia, Richard Katrovas, the oldest of five children, spent his early years in cars and motels living on the highways of America while his father, a petty thief and conman, eluded state and federal authorities.
Katrovas was adopted by relatives in his early teens, and lived with them for three years in Sasebo, Japan, where he earned a second-degree black belt in Shobukan Okinawa-te Karate.
The recipient of numerous grants and awards, Katrovas is the founding director of the Prague Summer Program,[4] and is the author[5] of seven books of poetry, Green Dragons (winner of the Wesleyan University Press New Poets Series), Snug Harbor, The Public Mirror, The Book of Complaints, and Dithyrambs, Scorpio Rising: Selected Poems; a book of short stories, Prague USA;[6] a memoir, The Years of Smashing Bricks and The Republic of Burma Shave, and a novel, The Mystic Pig; and Prague Winter.
Katrovas, as guest editor of a special double issue of the New Orleans Review, edited, and participated in much of the translation of, the first representative anthology of contemporary Czech poetry, Ten Years After the Velvet Revolution.