Kathleen McNamara’s short stories have appeared in the North American Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Witness, Nimrod International Journal, and elsewhere. She is the 2024 winner of the Tom Howard/John H. Reid short fiction prize. Her essays on motherhood and the body have been recognized with a Columbia Journal Nonfiction Award and Redivider’s Beacon Street Nonfiction Prize. She teaches in the English Department at Arizona State University, where she earned her MFA in Fiction. Prior to joining ASU, she graduated from Barnard College and worked at the New York Review of Books. Her writing has been supported by the Arizona Commission on the Arts, the Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing, and the Writers’ Colony at Dairy Hollow in Eureka Springs, Arkansas. She grew up in Los Angeles County and lives now with her husband and children in Arizona’s Verde Valley.

Photography by Daniele Rose