Kathryn Craft

An archive of Kathryn’s posts can be found HERE.

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. She has also contributed chapters to Author in Progress and The Complete Handbook of Novel Writing from Writers Digest Books.

Long a leader in the southeastern Pennsylvania writing scene, Kathryn has most recently served as the 2020 Guiding Scribe for the Women’s Fiction Writers Association. Since 2006, she has freelanced as a developmental editor at Writing-Partner.com. Additionally, she mentors writers as adjunct faculty for Drexel University’s MFA in Creative Writing and runs a year-long, small-group mentorship program, Your Novel Year that is now fully online. Kathryn also hosts writing retreats for women and speaks often about writing.

The Art of Falling (2014, Sourcebooks)
Kathryn’s debut novel is set in the Philadelphia dance world, a harsh microcosm of our society’s celebrity-driven expectations of women’s bodies. As a former modern dancer, choreographer, and 19-year dance critic, Kathryn knows this world. Her interest in body image is personal and life-long (isn’t every woman’s?) but she researched the issue while obtaining a master’s in health and physical education from Miami University, Ohio. Every page of the novel is infused with a dancer’s heightened awareness of the human body and its movement.

The Far End of Happy (2015, Sourcebooks)
Her award-winning second novel is based on true events surrounding the 1997 suicide standoff that resulted in her husband’s death. She drafted much of it in memoir form before realizing that the true impact of the tale could not be felt through one woman’s point of view. Since constraining the story to the twelve hours of that fateful day seemed the best way to evoke its effect as a turning point in her life, she decided to novelize.