About

Hello! I’m Kelly (she/her), and I’m a chronically ill writer, reader, and nerd based in Pittsburgh, PA.

Despite my attempts to become one, I am absolutely not a morning person, so I fit writing in on lunch breaks and the odd after work-but-before-dinner period. My fiction tends toward the strange and fantastical, and often focuses on death: as a reality, as a cycle, as a metaphor, as itself.

Sometimes I dabble in nonfiction, personal essays, book reviews, and interviews, and in another life, I worked as a community journalist. Once I wrote a poem, but it wasn’t very good. A few times I’ve tried to write essays that have turned into poems (or so I’m told; I’m doing my best to ignore the possibility entirely).

In the past, I’ve blogged for The Rumpus and written my own blogs on metafiction and living with chronic migraine. During my stint at a public library, I managed the daily blog in between helping patrons find their next great read and fixing up their resumes.

I graduated from Chatham University’s Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing program in 2013 with concentrations in fiction and travel writing. My creative work has won Redivider‘s Beacon Street Prize in fiction and appeared in a number of journals, including Permafrost, Sou’Wester, Pacifica Literary Review, Flash Fiction Online, and others. The folks at Permafrost were even kind enough to nominate me for a Pushcart Prize one year.

My current projects include a novel about a wayward daughter who can speak to dead people with the exception of her recently deceased father and a novella-in-flash-fiction about twin sisters who turn themselves into something like ghosts after their mother disappears. (Both of my parents are alive and well, thank you for asking!)

If any of this sounds mildly interesting to you, I spend far too much time on Twitter and am always happy to connect with new people. Thanks for stopping by, and remember to be excellent to each other!