About
Wearing various hats as a writer, editor, and communications consultant, Katherine partners with both individual writers and corporate, nonprofit, and academic clients on projects ranging from the long-form (books) to the very short-form (brochures, pitch letters, website content). In addition to freelancing, Katherine has been an intern at Writers House Literary Agency, a copyeditor at The Foundation Center, and an editorial fellow at Salon Media Group.
Katherine holds a bachelor’s degree in biological anthropology from Northwestern University and a master’s degree in literary journalism from NYU. She works with students on admissions essays and academic essays; for more about her academic editing, visit the Scintilla Tutors website here.
Katherine is the coauthor of six books (St. Martin’s Press, Publications International) and the author of Real Courage: The Story of Harper Lee, a YA (young adult reader) biography of Harper Lee (Morgan Reynolds, 2013). Nujood Ali and the Fight Against Child Marriage, Katherine’s second book with Morgan Reynolds, was published in 2015. Katherine’s essays and journalism have appeared at Salon, The Atlantic online, the Huffington Post, Next American City magazine, and other media outlets, and she is a regular contributor at Bustle.com and Romper.com.
Her first screenplay, a short film that she co-wrote with her friend Sakina Fakhri, was the first-place winner in the screenwriting category at the 2015 Los Angeles Movie Awards.
Though Katherine has practiced the art of editing in many forms, she has always enjoyed book editing the most. Books allow writers a level of elasticity and creativity that other forms of writing resist. While a successful screenplay is constrained by inherent guidelines of content and structure, a successful book can push stylistic boundaries without sacrificing its coherence or its artistry.
For more about The Book Don, please visit her personal website.
Style is a very simple matter; it is all rhythm. Once you get that, you can't use the wrong words. But on the other hand here am I sitting after half the morning, crammed with ideas, and visions, and so on, and can't dislodge them, for lack of the right rhythm. Now this is very profound, what rhythm is, and goes far deeper than any words. A sight, an emotion, creates this wave in the mind, long before it makes words to fit it.
Virginia Woolf
Letter, 1926
A man will turn over half a library to make one book.
Samuel Johnson
As quoted by his biographer, 1775