Kathleen McNamara is the author of the short story collection Gold in the Furnace, winner of the EastOver Press Debut Fiction Prize (forthcoming, 2027).

Her fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Alaska Quarterly Review, North American Review, Witness, Reed, Nimrod, The Pinch, and other journals, and 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 Prize.

Her essays on motherhood and the body have been recognized with Redivider's Beacon Street Nonfiction Prize and the Columbia Journal's Nonfiction Award.

She received a 2020 Research and Development Grant from the Arizona Commission on the Arts, and 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. Before joining ASU, she lived in Brooklyn and worked at The New York Review of Books.

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She grew up in Southern California and now lives in central Arizona with her husband, the writer Chad Fore, and their two young sons.

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