Bio
Kathryn Craft writes stories that seek beauty and meaning at the edge of darkness. Rich with material for further thought or discussion, her novels make a great choice for book clubs. They can also tell you a bit about her.
Kathryn tapped her background as a modern dancer, choreographer, and dance critic to write her debut novel, The Art of Falling, in which the Philadelphia dance world creates a harsh microcosm of our society’s celebrity-driven expectations of women’s bodies. Every page of the novel is infused with a dancer’s heightened awareness of the human body and its movement potential.
Her second novel, The Far End of Happy, was informed by the true events surrounding the 1997 standoff that resulted in her first husband’s death. Over seventeen years, writing short memoir pieces helped her find meaning in those chaotic events, but in the end, fictionalizing allowed her to deliver the story’s true impact by building it around those twelve fateful hours.
While powering up her fiction career, Kathryn served for more than a decade on the boards of the Greater Lehigh Valley Writers Group and the Philadelphia Writers’ Conference, endeavors that exposed her to some of the finest teachers in the novel-writing business. A desire to pass along these lessons inspired her to launch a developmental editing business in 2006. Shortly thereafter she began monthly gigs writing about story and the writing life at top blogging sites the Blood-Red Pencil, Writers in the Storm, and Writer Unboxed. Kathryn has founded reading groups, writing groups,
and a lakeside writing retreat; taught for Drexel University’s MFA program; and presented programs for dozens of conferences, libraries, bookstores, and community groups across many states. In 2020, she was named Guiding Scribe for the Women’s Fiction Writers Association.
In 2018, motivated by the common problems in novel manuscripts and bolstered by her two degrees in education, she founded her year-long mentorship program, Your Novel Year, so that other writers could benefit from the powerful aids that worked for her—effectively ordered craft lessons, analysis of examples from published novels, small-group support, and expert feedback.
Over time, realizing that her long-standing movement sensibility had lent fresh perspective to her approach to story craft, she began her newest project, a nonfiction how-to guide, Crafting Story Movement!
Kathryn lives with her husband just north of Philadelphia, PA, but it is her lifelong summer home on a spring-fed lake in the northern woods of New York State that holds a greater claim on her heart.
