Kate Durbin

Kate Durbin is an American, Los Angeles, California-based writer, digital and performance artist. She is the author of several books of fiction and poetry including E! Entertainment, ABRA, The Ravenous Audience, and Hoarders. Durbin's work primarily centers around popular culture and digital media, exploring the way the Internet, reality TV, and social media affect society and the human condition. She has called popular culture the subject matter of her work, as well as her artistic material. She often reworks non-fictional source material, including detailed transcriptions and found texts.

Of Durbin's writing, Christopher Higgs wrote for HTML Giant, "I call Kate Durbin one of the most compelling contemporary American writers because I feel like she's in her own lane. No one does what she does in the way that she does it." For Write or Die Magazine, Ben Fama wrote: "Kate has a gift of prophecy—she sees things happening before other people do, and uses this extreme present as material for her work."

Durbin pioneered the transcription of reality television dialogue and other minute details from these shows as a form of literature beginning with online publications in poetry journals of her transcriptions of MTV’s The Hills in early 2010. Her innovations have since been echoed in the work of other writers engaging with reality TV in literary contexts.