All About Katie

My story, my connections, my books, my c.v.—all in one place. Read on.

Long Bio:

Last updated: December 2019

Katie is a bestselling author, columnist, speaker, and occasional law professor in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. She is the author of fiction, including Entanglement (2015), Chasing Chaos (2016), Fallout Girl (2018), and Take Your Charming Somewhere Else (2020), all from Blue Crow Books. She is also the author of the #1 Amazon bestseller Life of the Mind Interrupted: Essays on Mental Health and Disability in Higher Education (2017), The Freelance Academic: Transform Your Creative Life and Career (2019), and Even If You’re Broken: Essays on Sexual Assault and #MeToo (2019), also from Blue Crow Books.

Katie is a columnist for Catapult, where she writes the popular “Mom, Interrupted” column; The Chronicle of Higher Education, where she writes the monthly column “The Public Writing Life”; and Women in Higher Education, where she covers timely issues in higher education including sexual assault and harassment. She regularly gives talks on mental health, sexual violence, and writing to a variety of groups around the country. 

After publishing her first novels with a small press, she 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. Katie 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. Stay in touch with Katie via her email letter, Writing Isn’t Sexy: pryalnews.com.

Katie attended boarding school for four years at Westtown School, a Friends school outside of Philadelphia, after which she attended Duke University. 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, she 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. 

Katie now writes full time, runs a publishing company, teaches as an adjunct at UNC Law, and raises two incredible children alongside a house full of shelter pets and a very supportive spouse. 

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Connect with Katie:

01. About Me

Author, essayist, sometime law professor. Topics that will get me talking: mental health and disability, sexual violence, and making words happen. I want to be your friend, even if I have trouble showing it.

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03. Letter

05. Commentary