Catherine Browder is a published writer of fiction and nonfiction, produced playwright, editor, and classroom professional with extensive experience teaching fiction, both in workshop and academic settings, and English as a second language, here and abroad. She has lived in England, Taiwan and Japan and several states of the US. As a result she does not consider any one landscape "home."
Author of several books of short fiction and a new novel, winner of the Petrichor Prize and forthcoming from Regal House Publishing, has held fiction fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and Missouri Arts Council. Her award-winning stories have appeared in Kansas Quarterly, New Letters, Nimrod, Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, Shenandoah, Kansas City Noir, and elsewhere. She facilitated “The Memory Project” at the Midwest Center for Holocaust Education, 2004-2008; taught in the creative writing program at the University of MIssouri-Kansas City; and was an advisory editor at New Letters magazine, where her book reviews have appeared.
Her newest book, "Resurrection City: Stories from the Disaster Zone", won the 2021 Spokane Prize from Willow Springs Books. The stories were inspired by a 2016 trip along the Tohoku Coast of Japan, still under heavy reconstruction following the devastating earthquake and tsunami of 3.11.
The "clash of cultures" is a recurring theme in her work.
She lives with her husband in the historic Northeast district of Kansas City, MO.
...The writing that most moves me is that which invites me into a world I scarcely know and makes that world vibrant and comprehensible.
... The best piece of advice I can offer is this: Write what you don't know. The wayfaring imagination is the most satisfying of all, to both writer and reader.
... The second most useless piece of advice given young writers is this: "Show, don't tell." Since when has the told portions of a story--the background or history or even flashbacks-- become inessential? The key is to balance telling--enlivened with vivid, sensual detail--with dramatized scenes.
... One size does not fit all. The young writer should be suspicious of advice telling her she must write first thing in the morning, or keep a journal, or always write in the same place, etc, etc. It may take two years to establish your own rhythm of work, but at least it will be yours.