About

Brief Bio

Katie Rose Guest Pryal, J.D., Ph.D., is a bestselling author, speaker, and law professor. She is the author of the #1 Amazon bestseller Life of the Mind Interrupted: Essays on Mental Health and Disability in Higher Education. She is also the author of The Freelance Academic: Transform Your Creative Life and Career and Even If You’re Broken: Essays on Sexual Assault and #MeToo. She’s written four novels: Entanglement, Chasing Chaos, Fallout Girl, and Take Your Charming Somewhere Else. She is a columnist for Women in Higher Education, where she covers gender issues, labor, and academia. Her popular column for Catapult magazine, “Mom, Interrupted,” is about family life, mental illness, and raising disabled kids as a disabled parent. Her column “Public Writing Life” for the Chronicle of Higher Education advises academics who wish to transition to writing for public audiences. She speaks frequent about mental health and disability, writing and publishing, gender issues, and higher education.

Media

If you are with the media and would like to interview me, great! Email me at contact@krgp.us.

Bookings

If you are interested in booking me to speak, contact the BrightSight Group, and my amazing team there will help you.

My Expertise

✤ Mental health and disability, including creating accessible and collegial workplaces

✤ Gender issues, and sexual violence, assault, and harassment

✤ Writing, including creative writing, writing craft, profession of writing, and publishing

✤ Higher education, careers in and state of, including legal education

✤ View my Portfolio to learn more

Long Bio

Last updated: December 2019

After publishing her first novels with a small press, Pryal co-founded Blue Crow Publishing, LLC, with Lauren Faulkenberry in 2017, which has since published many bestselling and award-winning titles under its Blue Crow Books imprint. She is also the co-proprietor of Blue Crow Author Services, which guides authors who seek to publish with major publishers and small presses, or as independent authors. Pryal is a member of the Tall Poppy Writers (tallpoppies.org), a community of women writers committed to connecting authors with each other and with readers.

Pryal attended boarding school for four years at Westtown School, a Friends school outside of Philadelphia, after which she attended Duke University, where she majored in English and French with a minor in Women’s Studies. She earned her master’s degree in creative writing from the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins, where she attended on a fellowship, and her law degree from UNC School of Law. After law school, Pryal clerked for a federal judge, practiced law, and earned her doctorate from UNC-Greensboro in English, specializing in Rhetoric and Composition. After graduating, she joined the faculty at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where taught in the English Department and the law school.

Pryal now writes full time, runs a publishing company, teaches as an adjunct at UNC Law, and raises two incredible children with a very supportive spouse. They care for a house full of shelter pets and a very large horse.

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