Jim Kates Papers

James (Jim) George Kates was born on March 4, 1945 in White Plains, New York. After graduating from White Plains High School in 1963, Kates attended Colby College Summer School of Languages where he received a diploma in advanced French. Kates’ educational experience includes studies at Wesleyan University, University of Rochester, Northeastern University, Boston University, School for International Training, and Harvard Extension School.

Kates became involved in the Civil Rights Movement in 1963, when he and a group of friends from White Plains helped solicit and collect donations for sharecroppers in Mississippi. In the summer of 1964, Kates served as a Freedom Summer volunteer in Holly Springs and Batesville, Mississippi. Kates returned to Mississippi in the summer of 1965 to volunteer in Natchez. The time between his two stays in Mississippi was spent first in Paris where he worked to organize the American community in Paris into a Paris Friends of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) / Council of Federated Organizations and then in Washington D.C as a volunteer in the SNCC office.

Kates later became a public school teacher, nonviolence trainer, poet and literary translator. In 1983, Kates was awarded a fellowship in creative writing from the National Endowment for the Arts. His writing has appeared in more than one hundred literary magazines, including The Massachusetts Review, The Agni Review and The International Poetry Journal. He has written, edited, and/or translated five books including a book of poems, Mappemonde (Oyster River Press, 2001), and an anthology of recent Russian poetry in translation, In the Grip of Strange Thoughts (Zephyr Press, 1999). Since 1997, he has co-directed Zephyr Press, publisher of Letters From Mississippi.

He and his wife, Helen, had two children, Stanislav and Paula.