Kathleen McNamara
Filed under: Authors
Kathleen McNamara's short fiction and essays have appeared in the North American Review, Witness, Reed, Nimrod, The Pinch, and other journals. Her fiction is also featured in the anthology This Side of the Divide (Vol. 2): New Lore of the American West from Baobab Press.
Her writing has won Columbia Journal's nonfiction contest, Redivider's Beacon Street prize, has been nominated for a Pushcart and a "Best of the Net" award, and was named a finalist for the Katherine Anne Porter Prize and the University of New Orleans Press Lab Prize, among other contests.
She earned a BA from Barnard College and an MFA in Fiction from Arizona State University. Prior to moving to Arizona, she lived in Brooklyn and worked at The New York Review of Books. She currently teaches writing at Arizona State University, where she was the 2021-2022 Creative Research Faculty Fellow at the Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing.
She's long at work on a novel, with the generous support of a research and development grant from the Arizona Commission on the Arts, and an environmental writing fellowship from the Writers' Colony of Dairy Hollow, in Eureka Springs, Arkansas.
She lives with her husband and their two young children in a riparian village in Arizona's Verde Valley. When she's not teaching or writing, you can find her hiking, trail-running, backpacking in the Grand Canyon, at the public library checking out more books than she can possibly read, or taking her kids to the community pool. Visit her website.
Website: https://www.kathleenbmcnamara.com/
Winning Entry: Cryptozoology
Contest Won: Tom Howard/John H. Reid Fiction & Essay Contest 2024, First Prize
