Kathleen McNamara

Kathleen McNamara is the author of the forthcoming short-story collection, Gold in the Furnace, winner of the EastOver Press Prize for Debut Story Collection.

Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in North American Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Reed, Nimrod International Journal, Redivider, Witness, and elsewhere. Her stories have been reprinted in the anthologies This Side of the Divide (Vol. 2): New Lore of the American West (Baobab Press) and Southern Lights: The Best of 75 Years of the Carolina Quarterly (UNC Press). 

Her essays on pregnancy and motherhood have been awarded the Beacon Street Nonfiction Prize and the Columbia Journal Nonfiction Prize. Her novel-in-progress has been supported by the Arizona Commission on the Arts, the Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing, and the Writers' Colony of Dairy Hollow. She is the 2024 winner of the Tom Howard/John H. Reid Fiction Prize.

She graduated from Barnard College and earned an MFA in fiction writing from ASU in 2014. Prior to joining Arizona State University, she worked at the New York Review of Books.