Katrina Trask (1853–1922) was an American poet and philanthropist. Together with her husband Spencer Trask, she co-founded Yaddo, an artists' colony that provided a place for creative work and exchange and left a distinctive mark on the history of American arts patronage. Her representative work is Under King Constantine. Available public sources offer limited information about the details of her life, her education, and her development as a writer, so a full picture of her biography is difficult to reconstruct. Judging from the works that survive, her writing often draws on classical legend and historical subjects, with concise language and attention to the union of narrative and atmosphere, reflecting the way late nineteenth-century American poets absorbed and reworked European cultural traditions. Her poetry and her philanthropy reinforced each other: she took part in artistic expression through her writing while supporting artistic communities through practical means.
