Bio

Katherine is a fiction writer and historian. She holds a BA in English Literature from Brown University and an MA in Creative Writing from Oxford University. Her current research interests focus on biofiction and queer history of the 1920s to the 1960s, and contemporary queer cinema. One of The Literary Consultancy LGBTQ+ Free Read Writers, Katherine was a Finalist in the Novel-in-Progress category of the William Faulkner Creative Writing Competition. She was the ALSCW (Association of Literary Scholars, Critics, and Writers) Fellow at the Vermont Studio Center and has been awarded residencies by the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Cill Rialaig, Ireland, Norton Island, Maine, and elsewhere. “The Party”, a short story about Vita Sackville-West and her first meeting with Virginia Woolf, was performed at the Tara Arts Theatre, London. Katherine has also received fellowships and/or scholarships from Squaw Valley Community of Writers, Aspen Summer Words, Colgate Writers’ Conference, Key West Literary Seminar, and the Arvon Foundation.

Project

At Faber I will be working on a historical novel, American Heroine, set in the 1950s and 60s, which chronicles the lives of two iconic women of the twentieth century and explores female desire and friendship. Much has been written about the Red Scare, but far less about the Lavender Scare that resulted in the persecution of thousands of gay men and women. The aim of this project is not only to imagine a hidden LGBT history in a repressive era but also to convey the message that love, and the expression of it, can and should be able to flourish anywhere.