Katherine Vaz

Katherine Vaz (born August 26, 1955) is an American writer.

Vaz is a recipient of a Literature Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts (1993) and the Davis Humanities Institute Fellowship (1999).

She has been named by the Luso-Americano as one of the Top 50 Luso-Americanos of the twentieth century and is the first Portuguese-American to have her work recorded for the Library of Congress, housed in the Hispanic Division.

Her second novel, Mariana, (HarperCollins, 1997), was selected by the Library of Congress as one of the Top 30 International Books of 1998 and has been translated into six languages.

Vaz's first short story collection Fado & Other Stories received the 1997 Drue Heinz Literature Prize and her second collection, Our Lady of the Artichokes, won the 2007 Prairie Schooner Book Prize.

A Briggs-Copeland Fellow in Fiction at Harvard University (2003–9), a 2006–7 Fellow of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, and the Fall, 2012 Harman Fellow at Baruch College in New York, she is the author of the critically acclaimed novel Saudade (St. Martin’s Press, 1994), the first contemporary novel about Portuguese-Americans from a major New York publisher.

It was optioned by Marlee Matlin/Solo One Productions and selected in the Barnes & Nobles Discover Great New Writers series.

The Portuguese-American Women’s Association (PAWA) named her 2003 Woman of the Year.

She was appointed to the six-person U.S. Presidential Delegation to open the American Pavilion at the World’s Fair/Expo 98 in Lisbon.

She lives in New York City and the Springs area of East Hampton with Christopher Cerf, whom she married in July 2015.