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 Southern Lights: 75 Years of the Carolina Quarterly, from the University of North Carolina Press. She is the 2024 winner of Tom Howard/John H. Reid Fiction Contest.

Her writing has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize 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 was named a finalist for the Katherine Anne Porter Prize and the University of New Orleans Press Lab Prize, among other contests. She received a 2020 research and development grant from the Arizona Commission on the Arts, and was awarded an environmental writing fellowship at the Writers' Colony of Dairy Hollow, in Eureka Springs, Arkansas. She currently teaches writing at Arizona State University, where she was the 2021-2022 Creative Research Faculty Fellow at the Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing.