Kathleen Rooney is a founding editor of Rose Metal Press, a publisher of literary work in hybrid genres, and a founding member of Poems While You Wait, a team of poets and their typewriters who compose commissioned poetry on demand. She teaches English and Creative Writing at DePaul University and is the author of eight books of poetry, nonfiction, and fiction, including the novel O, Democracy! (Fifth Star Press, 2014) and the novel in poems Robinson Alone (Gold Wake Press, 2012). With Eric Plattner, she is the co-editor of René Magritte: Selected Writings (University of Minnesota Press, 2016 and Alma Books, 2016). A winner of a Ruth Lilly Fellowship from Poetry magazine, her reviews and criticism have appeared in the New York Times Book Review, The Chicago Tribune, The New York Times Magazine, The Rumpus, The Nation the Poetry Foundation website and elsewhere. She lives in Chicago with her spouse, the writer Martin Seay.
Genres: Literary Fiction, Historical
Novels
O, Democracy! (2014)
Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk (2017)
The Listening Room (2018)
Cher Ami and Major Whittlesey (2020)
From Dust to Stardust (2023)
Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk (2017)
The Listening Room (2018)
Cher Ami and Major Whittlesey (2020)
From Dust to Stardust (2023)
Collections
Kathleen Rooney recommends
Please Be Advised (2022)
Christine Sneed
"Has anybody captured the petty power struggles, the absurd awkwardnesses, and the ineffable humiliations of office life as brilliantly and with as much humor as Christine Sneed in her novel-in-memos Please Be Advised? They have not. Make sure you get the memo and read it."
Walk the Vanished Earth (2022)
Erin Swan
"In her elegant and elegiac Walk the Vanished Earth, Erin Swan keeps her heart and imagination balanced between the past and the future. Whether she's writing about Kansas or Mars, she absorbs you not only in the plight of individual mothers and children, but in all of the children of Mother Earth. This is climate fiction at its finest and most thoughtful."
The Upstairs House (2021)
Julia Fine
"Macabre and funny, spooky and soulful, Julia Fine's The Upstairs House lets the reader inhabit a massively entertaining and slyly enlightening story nestled inside another story like a ghost within its host. Love and resentment, madness and clarity compete and comingle in this unforgettable tale of literature and legacy."
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