about
kathryn m. barber
Kate Barber is a fiction writer who grew up in the mountains that run along the state line of Tennessee and Virginia.
She earned her Master’s in literature from Mississippi State University and spends much of her time studying English history and Renaissance literature, especially Shakespeare. She earned her MFA in Creative Writing at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. Raised as a Baptist preacher’s daughter, Kate’s writing centers largely around small-town communities, music, southern families, and religion. She has taught composition, creative writing, and literature at UNC Wilmington, Mississippi State University, and Belmont University in Nashville.
Kate’s stories and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in Grist, The Masters Review, The Pinch, Blue Earth Review, Moon City Review and elsewhere. Her short story “Sorry About Your Bird” was featured in the New Voices section of The Masters Review and was a finalist and honorable mention in the James Hurst Prize for Fiction (2019) judged by Stephanie Powell Watts. A lover of literary magazines, she has held various positions on the mastheads of Ecotone, Southern Humanities Review, and the Jabberwock Review and has interned for Lookout Books. Currently, she is the Editorial Director for Press Pause Press. She is happiest when listening to fiddles and Dolly Parton tucked away in the Smoky Mountains or haunting the rivers and oceans of coastal Carolina.
MFA (fiction): University of North Carolina Wilmington, 2018
MA (literature/fiction writing): Mississippi State University, 2014
BA (literature/fiction writing): Carson-Newman University, 2012
