Long Bio

Katrina Kittle is the author of four novels for adults—Traveling Light, Two Truths and a Lie, The Kindness of Strangers, and The Blessings of the Animals—and one novel for tweens, Reasons to Be Happy. Her new novel Morning in This Broken World was an Amazon First Reads pick for August, and released in September 2023. The Kindness of Strangers was a BookSense pick and was the Fiction winner for the 2006 Great Lakes Book Awards. Her fourth novel The Blessings of the Animals was an IndieNext pick, a Midwest Connections pick, and was chosen by the Women’s National Book Association as one of ten Great Group Reads for National Book Club Month (October 2010). Her novels center on themes of social justice and finding family and community outside the traditional definitions of those terms.

Katrina is a graduate of Ohio University and earned her MFA in creative writing from Spalding University in Louisville. She has been on faculty for the Antioch Writers' Workshop, the Erma Bombeck Writers' Workshop, the Chicago Writers Association Conference, The Writer's Block Conference in Louisville, and The Writer's Digest Novel Writing Conference. She loves to teach creative writing workshops, focusing on craft and motivation (and is especially good at jumpstarting stalled writers). She’s taught online and in the Dayton-Cincinnati-Columbus area for Word’s Worth Writing Connections since 2008, and as a Lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Dayton since 2018.  

Katrina is also a public speaker, most often leading her “Leap and the Net Will Appear” and “Happy Class” workshops.

She was the 2013 John E. Nance Writer-in-Residence for The Thurber House in Columbus, Ohio, and has ghost stories to tell from living in the Thurber House haunted attic. She is a three time recipient of an Ohio Arts Council Grant.

In past lives, Katrina has taught high school and middle school English and theatre, and has worked as a house cleaner, a veterinary assistant, a children’s theatre director and costumer, in case management support for the AIDS Foundation Miami Valley (now Equitas), and in enforcement support for Miami Valley Fair Housing Association. In other lives, Katrina might have become a chef or a veterinarian.

Katrina lives south of Dayton with her fella, her spooky little weirdo cat Annie, her sweet beagle Serena, and her out-of-control garden. She has a thing for goats, gardening, and going barefoot; and is addicted to coffee, pedicures, and Indian food. You can occasionally see her on stage in local community theatre productions, and she is always at work on another novel.