Kathleen McNamara's short fiction and essays have appeared in the North American Review, Witness, Reed, Columbia Journal, Nimrod, Redivider, The Pinch, and other journals. Her fiction is available in This Side of the Divide (Vol. 2): New Lore of the American West, from Baobab Press, and is forthcoming in an anthology honoring 75 years of the best work published in the Carolina Quarterly.

Her writing has been nominated for a Pushcart and a "Best of the Net" award, and has been honored with first-place prizes in Redivider, the Columbia Journal, and the Carolina Quarterly. Her fiction has been a finalist for the Katherine Anne Porter Prize and the University of New Orleans Press Lab Prize, among other contests. She is a 2020 recipient of a research and development grant from the Arizona Commission on the Arts, a former Creative Research Faculty Fellow at the Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing, and the recipient of an environmental writing fellowship at the Writers' Colony of Dairy Hollow. She currently teaches writing at Arizona State University.