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.

She 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. She has taught composition, creative writing, and literature at UNC Wilmington, Mississippi State University, 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. Currently, she is the Senior Editor and Marketing Assistant for Encore magazine.

ABOUT

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, Capeside Candles, where she pours scents inspired by her hometowns, favorite television and literary characters, and family members.

She is happiest when listening to Dolly Parton tucked away in the Smoky Mountains, haunting the rivers and oceans of coastal Carolina, or talking about Anne Boleyn.