literary fiction

Kathryn wrote her debut novel, The Shores of Our Souls, in response to 9/11’s Ground Zero, because she wanted to center and align people and shift societal prejudices and labels. As a young adult, she devoured novels by writers who cared about social justice: Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Eudora Welty (a frequent visitor to her university campus), Barbara Kingsolver, and Anne Lamott. Her favorite novel is John Steinbeck’s East of Eden.

As a quirky, weird child, Kathryn wanted to shift the world through words and stories. Every summer she sat on a wooden porch swing, listening to friends and relatives weave stories of the day, the weather, local politics, and news from all around. Yet she wanted to leave and live far beyond that porch.

MANY VOICES

As she began to travel, Kathryn still felt a longing to tell stories, carrying family love and Southern lore with her. She felt a pull to see the world, so she became a journalist, publishing in newspapers, magazines and literary journals, working full-time for the National Geographic Society. She felt a longing to support that world, so she joined the International Red Cross and Red Crescent. She wanted to connect the world and its stories, to link people needing help to those who could help them, so she became an entrepreneur, a speaker, and a coach.

ONE WORLD

Through her journey, and other people’s stories, she’s come to see the world as One. Decades from that porch swing, she continues to share stories, connecting neighbors from one continent to the next. She’s given a voice to the homeless, people with AIDS, patients searching for a blood or bone marrow donor, neighborhoods ravaged by disaster, refugees fleeing poverty and civil strife, and victims of war.

INFINITE POSSIBILITIES

Kathryn always returns to the WORD. She’s used words to:

• win the Hollins University Fiction Award for her novel Moments On The Edge,

• write award-winning nonfiction,

• direct an international publications department,

• own a cause-related marketing business,

• create her umbrella company, Ground One, to search for solutions that will result in social change,

• receive literary and cause-related marketing awards,

• sing as a mezzo soprano,

• shake the hands of Jimmy Carter, Princess Diana, and Nelson Mandela,

• break bread with Kinky Friedman and Marita Golden,

• meet people on almost every continent,

• teach and speak to people searching for inner peace, their own grounding, in a world that sometimes seems all chaos.

Kathryn graduated Phi Beta Kappa in English from Hollins University in Virginia, and earned her graduate degree in Publications Management from George Washington University. She’s lived and worked in Europe and Africa, traveling throughout the Middle East. Her most recent short story, “A Green Rose,” was published by and received an award of excellence from the journal Willow Review, and The Shores of Our Souls was a semi-finalist in the Faulkner-Wisdom Literary Competition. All of her writing focuses on the search for peace and the connections we all share.

KathrynBrownRamsperger.com