Kate Hymes is a writer and poet living in New Paltz. She has led Wallkill Valley Writers workshops for over twenty years. Writers who have written with her have dubbed her the story doula. Her poems have been published in national and regional anthologies, most recently mightier: Poets for Social Justice, published by Calling All Poets, 2020.  She is currently working on poems inspired by the history of people of African descent in New Paltz and Ulster County. 

“I love poetry because it is accessible to everyone. A poem doesn't require the time commitment of other art forms or writing genres. A five or ten-minute commitment can give the reader an experience so significant that the feeling of reading that poem, specific lines, or images will stay with the reader for a lifetime," Hymes said. "At present, my work focuses on the lives of free and enslaved people of African descent in New Paltz, New York. I hope to write poems that fill in the gaps left by government and church records. The lives of Black people in New Paltz, and Ulster County, are largely visible through a glass, darkly in local news clippings, and personal letters and diaries of the white community. I am inspired by lines from a Kwame Dawes poem, A Way of Seeing: No records, just smells of stories/passing through most tenuous links... I want to be a griot who writes poems and tells the stories that keep the ancestors alive."