After studying poetics with poets Milton Kessler and Stephen Stepanchev, and carrying on correspondence with Robert Bly, Art Gatti graduated Queens College with a minor in poetry and a few honors, -notably the 1965 CUNY-(City University of New York)-wide Dwight Durling Award for a manuscript of poetry.
In the face of the Vietnam War, and in response to the growing need to resist racial injustice in the United States, he entered the world of 'sixties activism. He was a co-founder of Queens College SDS, collaborator with the late Mario Savio, of Free Speech Movement fame, and co-community-organizer in Newark, New Jersey, with the recently deceased Tom Hayden, of Chicago Eight fame. Working with Savio in 1963 and '64, he headed up a project in a barrio outside of Taxco, Guerrero, Mexico, for the construction of a school in the area's poorest neighborhood.
In 2011, his efforts and material contributions helped establish at his old alma mater the northeastern United States' largest and most comprehensive archive of Civil Rights and community activism.
Political involvements eventually led him to journalism. He published hundreds of articles and columns and two books, wrote staged downtown comedy shows and sold a screenplay to the Hollywood powerhouse, New Line Cinema. As a result of the latter, he is a member-in-good-standing of the Producer-Writers Guild of America.
He's won various writing awards and has been published in The New Mexico Quarterly, America Sings, The East Village Other, PiF, The New York Hangover, And Then, Image9, Allegro, Riverside Library Poets Anthologies 2015 and 2016, Jefferson Market Library Poets Anthology 2017, The New York Times "Metropolitan Diary", and the international anthology From Neza York to New York-a collaboration of U.S. and Mexican poets that was honored by the Mexican government and celebrated at its NYC consulate in 2015 and '16.
He chaired a poetry/fiction workshop at WestBeth, Lower Manhattan's massive artists residency, and had a regular column, "Misadventures in Poetry," in WestView News. In 2015 he published a book of poetry with a half-century of poems he wrote about our sister nation, called Mexico-Dust in My Blood.
In 2016, he assisted in the English translation of In the Fire of Time, the poetry of the Mexican poet, María Ángeles Juárez Téllez.
