Judith Katz

Judith Katz (born 1951) is an American playwright, thespian, and novelist. Her debut novel, Running Fiercely Toward a High Thin Sound, won a Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction.

Early life and education Judith Katz was born in 1951 in Worcester, Massachusetts, where she grew up in a traditional Jewish family.

She graduated with a bachelor's in English from the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 1973.

Later in 1973, she moved to Omaha, Nebraska, where she worked with the Magic Theatre as a playwright-in-residence, technician, producer, and performer until 1977.

Katz moved to Minneapolis, Minnesota, in 1983 to work with the feminist theater group At the Foot of the Mountain. While with the group, she wrote and performed in plays such as The Monster in My Mother's House.

In 1992, she published her first novel, Running Fiercely Toward a High Thin Sound. It won the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction the following year.

Her next novel, The Escape Artist, was released in 1997. It was a finalist for the 1998 Stonewall Book Award for Literature.

From the early 1980s until her retirement in 2020, she also worked as an adjunct and academic advisor for the Departments of English and Gender, Women & Sexuality Studies at the University of Minnesota.

Her papers are held as part of the Jean-Nickolaus Tretter Collection in Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender Studies at the University of Minnesota Libraries.