Dori Katz was born in Antwerp, Belgium to Polish and Czech parents a year before the Germans invaded and occupied Belgium in 1940. With the exception of Dori and her mother who survived separately in hiding, her entire family, including her father, was deported to Auschwitz where they perished. Reunited after the war, she and her mother came to America in 1952. She earned a PhD. in Comparative Literature from the University of Iowa and is currently Professor Emeritus of Modern Languages and Literature from Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut, where she taught French and Modern European Literature for several decades. She has published many poems and translations from the French in anthologies, journals, and reviews, and has published a bilingual book of poetry, Hiding in Other People's Houses, with her poems translated into Spanish. Her memoir Looking for Strangers: The True Story of my Hidden Wartime Childhood has been published by the University of Chicago Press. It was a finalist for an award from The National Jewish Book Council for 2013.

The Southeast Steuben County Library in Corning, partnering with Card Carrying Books on Market Street, donated 40 copies of Lola Lafon’s When You Listen to This Song, a book that Dr. Katz highly recommended to us!