ABOUT
Kate Barber is a fiction writer, teacher, editor, and scholar who grew up in the mountains that run along the state line of Tennessee and Virginia.
Kate earned her Master’s in literature from Mississippi State University and MFA in Creative Writing at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. Her areas of expertise include fiction writing, Renaissance literature and history, and Shakespeare. Raised a Baptist preacher’s daughter, Kate’s writing centers largely around small-town communities, music, southern families, and religion. Obsessed with the idea of ghosts since childhood, she loves Appalachian folklore, ghost tales, legends, and anything haunted. In the past, she has taught composition, creative writing, and literature at UNC Wilmington, Mississippi State University, and Belmont University.
Kate’s stories and essays have appeared 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, Press Pause Press, and the Jabberwock Review and has interned for Lookout Books. She serves on the board of Encore magazine, where she’s also a contributing writer, senior editor, and marketing assistant.
By day, she works as a content marketing writer for a fintech company in Wilmington, North Carolina, where she lives with her family. An avid and devoted Dawson’s Creek fan, she also owns a small candle business called Capeside Candles, featuring scents inspired by her hometowns, television and literary characters, and family members.
After devoting many years to primarily studying the craft of contemporary fiction writing, she’s recently returned to her first love, early modern England, and spends much of her time these days studying Shakespeare, the Tudor dynasty, Elizabethian and Jacobian theatre, and Renaissance literature. Other fields of literary interest include fairy tales, Greek mythology, horror, ghost stories of all kinds, and southern and Appalachian writing.
She is happiest when listening to Dolly Parton tucked away somewhere in the Smoky Mountains, riding around the river in Hiltons with her childhood best friend, haunting the ocean of coastal Carolina, reading by the pond in her backyard, or talking about Henry VIII’s wives.
TL; DR: Dawson’s Creek, ghost stories, Appalachia, Shakespeare, Anne Boleyn
favorite stories & storytellers
Contemporary novels: Bloodroot by Amy Greene, Oral History by Lee Smith, A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan, Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Book of Longings by Sue Monk Kidd, The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver, The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett, Hamnet by Maggie O’Ferrell, The Prettiest Star by Carter Sickels, The Secret Lives of Church Ladies by Deesha Philyaw, and anything by Jill McCorkle
Writers: Tayari Jones, David Joy, Kristen Arnett, Carmen Maria Machado, Yaa Gyasi, Kevin Wilson, Isabel Cañas, Leesa Cross-Smith, Silas House, Grady Hendrix, Wiley Cash, Garrard Conley, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Clare Beams
Literary classics: The Great Gatsby, Rebecca, Wuthering Heights, Paradise Lost, The Canterbury Tales, The Color Purple, The Scarlet Letter, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pride and Prejudice, Jane Eyre, Great Expectations, Doctor Faustus, The Importance of Being Earnest
Shakespeare plays: Twelfth Night, Much Ado About Nothing, Hamlet, Macbeth, Othello, The Merchant of Venice, Richard III
Films: Casablanca, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, The Princess Bride, When Harry Met Sally, The Wizard of Oz, Gaslight, Steel Magnolias, Ocean’s 11, Ever After, Easy A, Selena, 10 Things I Hate About You, Pulp Fiction, Win a Date with Tad Hamilton, Double Indemnity, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, Sweet Home Alabama, Sordid Lives
Horror films/series: Ready or Not, The Invitation, I Know What You Did Last Summer, Scream, Urban Legend, Things Heard and Seen, The Haunting of Bly Manor, The Haunting of Hill House
Television: Dawson’s Creek, Grey’s Anatomy seasons 1-3, Desperate Housewives, The Office, Schitt’s Creek, Superstore, Bob’s Burgers, What We Do in the Shadows, One Tree Hill, Smallville, Nashville, Brooklyn 99, Vampire Diaries, Gilmore Girls, Wolf Hall
Historians: Tracy Borman, Natalie Grueninger, Elizabeth Norton, Alison Weir, Nicola Tallis, Owen Emmerson, Gareth Russell
Musicals: Wicked, Hadestown, The Phantom of the Opera, Six, Moulin Rouge, Rent, Chicago