Interviewed by John King Drunken Odyssey Podcast–Episode #570, April 1, 2023
Kathleen Rooney is a founding editor of Rose Metal Press, a nonprofit publisher of literary work in hybrid genres, as well as a founding member of Poems While You Wait, a collective of poets and their vintage typewriters who compose poetry on demand.
Her most recent books include the novels Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk (St. Martin’s Press, 2017) and Cher Ami and Major Whittlesey (Penguin, 2020). Her poetry collection Where Are the Snows won the 2021 X.J. Kennedy Prize and was published by Texas Review Press in Fall of 2022.
A winner of the Ruth Lilly Prize from Poetry magazine and the Adam Morgan Literary Citizen Award from the Chicago Review of Books, her criticism appears in The New York Times, The Minneapolis Star Tribune, The Brooklyn Rail, Chicago Magazine, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and elsewhere. She lives in Chicago with her spouse, the writer Martin Seay, and teaches English and Creative Writing at DePaul University.
Since 2012, John King has hosted The Drunken Odyssey: A Podcast About the Writing Life. He is the author of Guy Psycho and the Ziggurat of Shame (Beating Windward 2019). His fiction and poetry has appeared in Gargoyle, Painted Bride Quarterly, Shift, Turnrow, The Newer York, and other outlets of literary excellence.