Catherine Knepper is from a town you’ve probably never heard of in rural North Carolina. After studying English and religion in NC, she emigrated to New England and earned a master’s degree in theology from Boston University. She’s served as a fiction reader for AGNI, The Iowa Review, and the John Simmons Short Story Collection Prize. A recent graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, she is currently at work on a novel.

At the University of Iowa, Catherine taught writing workshops in both fiction and poetry. She believes good writers are first and foremost good readers, and favors a craft-based approach that draws its lessons from literature. She has a particular interest in characterization, language, and writing style, and in guiding first-time novelists through the process of revision. While her personal reading interests are mainly literary, she’s always on the lookout for a good horror or fantasy novel. An avid reader, she’s reluctant to single out a few favorites, but Flannery O’Connor always makes the short list, and her reading of late includes Edith Wharton, Frank McCourt, C.S. Lewis, Tony Earley, Knut Hamsun, and George Eliot (Middlemarch being an ongoing project).

Catherine and her husband recently moved to Des Moines, where they spend their spare time renovating a house that celebrated its centenary in 2005.

Interested in working with Catherine? Please click here.