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“Katherine Vaz writes with piercing, startling beauty: every sentence suffused with longing, every moment shining with possibility. In Above the Salt she offers us a story of discovery and loss, and the fragile but unwavering bonds of love that endure, despite it all. Vaz’s Saudade is a novel that has stayed with me for decades. In this latest book, Katherine Vaz has confirmed herself as one of our best writers. ”

— Maaza Mengiste on Above the Salt

“Katherine Vaz stories always pull me in—the heartfelt intensity, her intimate knowledge of her characters, their places, human nature—each one makes me happily her captive, for as long as the story lasts. Her newest collection is a triumph for us all.”

— Alexander Chee on The Love Life of an Assistant Animator

“[A] collection of beautifully written short stories steeped in tragedy and religious mysticism...Vaz is a soulful writer who understands her protagonists’ complex lives...”

— Publishers Weekly on Our Lady of the Artichokes

“This wonderfully inventive novel, which contains elements of magic realism, is infused with a sense of saudade-a Portuguese word that, according to the author, can be understood as an extremely intense longing for a time, place, or people... First novelist Vaz has written a challenging and rewarding work of fiction.”

— Library Journal on Saudade

“[T]his collection is filled with narrative and character grounded in the meaning and value the earth gives to human existence.”

— New York Review of Books on Fado & Other Stories

“Mariana glows with colour...in its lyrical description of ordinary lives transfigured and its account of spiritual and emotional struggles.”

— Times Literary Supplement

Katherine Vaz’s latest book is the novel Above the Salt (Flatiron Books, 2023), which Publishers Weekly called an “ambitious and heartbreaking saga” in a starred review. Her other novels include Saudade (St. Martin’s Press, 1994), a Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers selection, and Mariana, published in six languages and chosen by the Library of Congress as one of the Top Thirty International Books of 1998. She is also the author of three story collections: The Love Life of an Assistant Animator & Other Stories (Tailwinds Press, 2017); Our Lady of the Artichokes and Other Portuguese-American Stories (University of Nebraska Press, 2008), winner of a Prairie Schooner Award; and Fado & Other Stories (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1997), winner of a Drue Heinz Literature Prize. The Heart Is a Drowning Object, a collaboration with artist Isabel Pavão, was released as an e-book with Artists Proof Editions in 2019.

Her children’s stories have appeared in anthologies by Viking, Penguin, and Simon & Schuster, and her short fiction has appeared in many magazines. She won a New York Film Academy and Writer’s Store national contest for a screenplay idea based on one of her stories.

She has been a Briggs-Copeland Fellow in Fiction at Harvard University and a Fellow of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. She was the first Portuguese-American to have her work recorded by the Library of Congress (Hispanic Division) and teaches “Writing the Luso Experience” each summer in the Disquiet International Literary Conference in Lisboa, Portugal. Other honors include a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a citation as a Portuguese-American Woman of the Year, an appointment to the six-person Presidential Delegation (Clinton) to the World’s Fair/Expo 98 in Lisboa, and a 2022 citation by the Portuguese-American Leadership Council of the U.S. as one of the all-time most influential women of Lusa heritage. She is the first and only American to be featured on the seven-season hit primetime show Primeira Pessoa.

Asked in an interview about the best advice she received as a young writer, Vaz replied: “In my case, it was somebody saying, ‘Why don’t you tell me some of the things that are yours?’ I think that looking for what you have inside you is the place to begin. But then, just studying stories for what they can teach you about what you can do with your own material, because you have to be an original. You cannot write like anyone else. By definition, original means that it has to come from you. So, you learn with the part of your brain that’s always trying to learn more, the way a musician has to be an original, but I’ve never met a musician who didn’t study music, what’s being done in the field. Mostly, it’s trying to say, ‘What’s my voice, and how do I create it?’”

She lives in New York City with her husband, Christopher Cerf, an Emmy- and Grammy-winning TV producer, composer for Sesame Street, editor, and author.

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