Kathleen Williams Renk
Bewildering Stories biography
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Obsessed with the Brontës since I was a teen, I wrote my first scholarly book, in part, about Jane Eyre’s prequel, Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea. “Dear Reader, I Didn’t Marry Him” playfully pays homage to both.
A native of St. Louis, Missouri, I’ve published short fiction, essays, and poetry in Iowa City Magazine, Literary Yard, Page and Spine, Dark Passions, CC & D Magazine, and Gaia Lit. While earning my doctorate, I was lucky to study fiction writing with the Pulitzer-Prize winning author and Iowa Writers’ Workshop professor, James Alan McPherson. Since retiring from academia in 2018, I’ve returned to creative writing.
In the fall of 2020, Cuidono Press, in New York, published my first historical fiction novel, Vindicated: A Novel of Mary Shelley, which won the 2021 Story Circle Network’s May Sarton Prize. Bedazzled Ink Publishing, in California, published my novels The Rossetti Diaries (2023), and No Coward’s Soul Have I (2024). My work-in-progress is a historical fiction novel about the writer and fellow St. Louisan, Kate Chopin.
An amateur musician, I live on the Front Range in Colorado, where you’ll frequently find me hiking with a bevy of elderly dames.
If you’d like to know more about my work, please visit: kathleenrenk.com.
Copyright © 2025 by Kathleen Williams Renk
