About Kathryn
Kathryn (she/her) is going home to Southern Illinois, her favorite nowhere in the world.
Kathryn’s legal last name is a lot, so she writes as Kathryn F.K. She writes mostly poetry, but she spins the occasional tale in prose, taking liberties with family stories. She has lived in eight states, mostly in the Midwest. Before moving back home to the Midwest, she spent six years in South Carolina, where she felt incredibly out of place. That is, until she found Coastal Carolina University and rediscovered her writing self. Through writing she seeks to understand home, belonging, motherhood, family, mental illness, and shame.
Sewanee School of Letters
MFA Creative Writing
Sewanee, Tennessee
June 2024-
Coastal Carolina University
M.A. Writing
Conway, South Carolina
Degree Conferred December 2024
In Summer 2022, a month before sending my sons back into the nearly post-pandemic world, I began seeking opportunities to become a Writer [capital “w”]. I approached the coordinator of the Coastal Master of Arts in Writing (MAW) program to ask “Is this something a middle-aged woman with an incredibly rusty master’s degree in Library Science can do?” Together, we came up with a plan to find out. I signed up for an undergraduate Creative Writing class for the fall semester. I loved the students, the professor, and the work. Especially poetry, a pleasant surprise. So, I submitted an application to MAW, said a little prayer, and was admitted in Spring 2023.
Brothers K
Mother
South Dakota, Illinois, Ohio, and South Carolina
2008 – Present
When I discovered I was carrying our first could-be kid in February 2008, my husband and I were living in a renovated loft in a former International Harvester warehouse in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. I had been unable to find professional employment since we had moved from out of state months earlier, and I did not foresee a meaningful career at the Irish gift store I had worked in through the holiday season. My mother was 11 hours away. My husband traveled frequently for work. We bought a little house on the prairie and decided I would assume the privilege of being a full-time mom.
The Mommy Wars make me feel mighty prickly, as they have been manufactured to make mothers and other stay-at-home parents question our choices (or lack of) and each other. No thanks. Being a mother, being a parent, is hard work. Otherwise employed or not.
Prehistory
Human, Daughter, Student
Southern Illinois
1979-Present
The Cumberland Plateau calls. Stories and Poems are waiting for me there, ones that haven’t found me yet. Six summery weeks of words and woods for the next couple years.
My mom loves to tell anyone who will listen that I taught myself to read before Kindergarten. This despite never attending preschool. She and my grandma talk a lot, and I am convinced their nonstop chatter had something to do with that. As well as weekly trips to the library and Reading Rainbow. I have been writing silly stories since I was young. A simultaneously loud and shy child, always awkward around people, I could hide in plain sight by looking busy with pen & paper.
I have an undergraduate degree (BA, 2001) in Art with an Art History concentration and a graduate degree (MS, 2004) in Library and Information Science. It has taken me until mid-life to work up the courage to even try to publish creative works. Here I go.