 |
Katherine Center | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Born | Katherine Sherar Pannill March 4, 1972 |
| Education | Vassar College (AB) University of Houston (MA) |
| Occupation | Author |
| Relatives | Lizzie Fletcher (sister) |
Katherine Sherar Pannill Center (born March 4, 1972) is an American author of contemporary fiction. [1]
Center was born and raised in Afton Oaks, Houston, Texas. [2] She graduated from St. John's School and from Vassar College. [3] She won the Vassar College Fiction Prize while a student. She received her M.A. in fiction from the University of Houston, where she was the co-editor of the literary fiction magazine, Gulf Coast . Her graduate thesis, Peepshow, a collection of stories, was a finalist for the Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction. [4] She has two sisters, one of whom is U.S. Representative Lizzie Fletcher.
Center is the author of several books, which she has called "bittersweet comic novels." Her first novel, The Bright Side of Disaster (2006), was optioned by Varsity Pictures, and her sixth, How to Walk Away (2018), [5] was a New York Times bestseller and Book of the Month Club pick for May 2018 and a Target Book Club pick for July 2019. Center's 2019 novel Things You Save in a Fire was New York Times bestseller, and a Book of the Month Club pick for July 2019. Her 2022 novel, The Bodyguard debuted at #11 on the New York Times bestseller list, #35 on the USA Today bestseller list, and it was a Book of the Month Club pick for July 2022.
Along with Jeffrey Toobin and Douglas Brinkley, Center was one of the speakers at the 2007 Houston Chronicle Book and Author Dinner.
Center has published essays in Real Simple and the anthologies Because I Love Her, CRUSH: 26 Real-Life Tales of First Love, and My Parents Were Awesome.
Center also makes video essays, one of which, a letter to her daughter about motherhood, became the very popular Defining a Movement video for the Mom 2.0 conference. Center spoke at the 2018 TEDx Bend. Her talk was called "We Need to Teach Boys to Read Stories About Girls".
In 2020, a film adaptation of her novel The Lost Husband was released starring Leslie Bibb and Josh Duhamel. [6] It hit number one on Netflix in August of 2020 and wound up in their top 25 movies for the year. In 2021, a film adaptation of her 2015 novel, Happiness For Beginners was filmed for Netflix starring Ellie Kemper and Luke Grimes for release in 2023. [7] It hit Netflix's global Top 10 in 81 countries.
Catherine Chidgey is a New Zealand novelist, short-story writer and university lecturer. She has published eight novels. Her honours include the inaugural Prize in Modern Letters; the Katherine Mansfield Fellowship to Menton, France; Best First Book at both the New Zealand Book Awards and the Commonwealth Writers' Prize ; the Acorn Foundation Fiction Prize at the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards on two occasions; and the Janet Frame Fiction Prize.
Geraldine Brooks is an Australian American journalist and novelist whose 2005 novel March won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni is an Indian-born American author, poet, and the Betty and Gene McDavid Professor of Writing at the University of Houston Creative Writing Program. Her short story collection, Arranged Marriage, won an American Book Award in 1996. Two of her novels, as well as a short story were adapted into films.
Michelle Richmond is an American novelist, essayist, and short story writer. She wrote The Year of Fog, which was a New York Times bestseller, The Marriage Pact, which was a Sunday Times bestseller, and six other books of fiction.
Martha Elizabeth "Libba" Bray is an American writer of young adult novels including the Gemma Doyle Trilogy, Going Bovine, and The Diviners.
Julie Orringer is an American novelist, short story writer, and professor. She attended Cornell University and the Iowa Writer's Workshop, and was a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. She was born in Miami, Florida and now lives in Brooklyn with her husband, fellow writer Ryan Harty. She is the author of The Invisible Bridge, a New York Times bestseller, and How to Breathe Underwater, a collection of stories; her novel, The Flight Portfolio, tells the story of Varian Fry, the New York journalist who went to Marseille in 1940 to save writers and artists blacklisted by the Gestapo. The novel inspired the Netflix series Transatlantic.
Min Jin Lee is a Korean American author and journalist based in Harlem, New York City; her work frequently deals with the Korean diaspora. She is best known for writing Free Food for Millionaires (2007) and Pachinko (2017), a finalist for the National Book Award, and runner-up for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. In 2024, the New York Times asked 503 novelists, nonfiction writers, poets, critics and other book lovers to vote for 100 Best Books of the 21st Century and Lee's book Pachinko was number 15 on the list. Pachinko was number 5 on the Reader's Version of 100 Best Books of the 21st Century. The Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald Museum awarded the 2024 Fitzgerald Prize for Literary Excellence to Min Jin Lee, recognizing her for continuing the American storytelling tradition with the craft, wit, and social insight exemplified by F. Scott Fitzgerald.
Lauren Groff is an American novelist and short story writer. She has written five novels and two short story collections, including Fates and Furies (2015), Florida (2018), Matrix (2022), and The Vaster Wilds (2023).
Sarah Rees Brennan is an Irish writer best known for young adult fantasy fiction. Her first novel, The Demon's Lexicon, was released June 2009 by Simon & Schuster. Rees Brennan's books are bestsellers in both the UK and USA.
Katherine Howe is an American novelist who lives in New England and New York City. She specializes in historical novels which she uses to query ideas about "the contingent nature of reality and belief." Her debut novel was the New York Times Bestseller The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane (2009), related to the Salem witch trials. Its success led to her being a guest on several TV news shows, as well as "Salem: Unmasking The Devil" on the National Geographic Channel.
Rebecca Stead is an American writer of fiction for children and teens. She won the American Newbery Medal in 2010, the oldest award in children's literature, for her second novel When You Reach Me.
Aminatta Forna is a British writer of Scottish and Sierra Leonean ancestry. Her first book was a memoir, The Devil That Danced on the Water: A Daughter's Quest (2002). Since then she has written four novels: Ancestor Stones (2006), The Memory of Love (2010), The Hired Man (2013) and Happiness (2018). In 2021 she published a collection of essays, The Window Seat: Notes from a Life in Motion. (2021), which was a new genre for her.
Carole Matthews is a successful and popular British author, famous for her sense of humour and her romantic comedy novels. Her books have sold over 7.0 million books worldwide and have been published in more than 31 countries. In 2011, Matthews was inducted into the Festival of Romance Hall of Fame for her outstanding contribution to romance writing.
Soman Chainani is an American author, best known for writing the children's book series The School for Good and Evil. Some of his work has been adapted to films.
Kimberly McCreight is an American author. Her debut novel, Reconstructing Amelia, was a New York Times bestseller that was nominated for the Edgar, Anthony, and Alex Awards. It was also named Entertainment Weekly’s Favorite Book of the Year. Reconstructing Amelia has been optioned for TV by HBO and Blossom Films.
Jasmin Darznik is an Iranian-born American writer. She is the New York Times bestselling author of three books, The Bohemians, Song of a Captive Bird, a novel inspired by the life of Forugh Farrokhzad, Iran's notorious woman poet, and The Good Daughter: A Memoir of My Mother's Hidden Life, which became a New York Times bestseller. A New York Times Book Review "Editors' Choice" and a Los Angeles Times bestseller, Song of a Captive Bird was praised by The New York Times as a "complex and beautiful rendering of [a] vanished country and its scattered people; a reminder of the power and purpose of art; and an ode to female creativity under a patriarchy that repeatedly tries to snuff it out." The Bohemians was selected by Oprah Daily as one of the best historical novels of 2021. Darznik's books have been published in seventeen countries.
Elizabeth Acevedo is an American poet and author. In September 2022, the Poetry Foundation named her the year's Young People's Poet Laureate.
Dhonielle Clayton is an American author and chief operating officer of We Need Diverse Books. She has written multiple book series, including The Belles (2018-2023). She also collaborated with Tiffany D. Jackson, Angie Thomas, Nic Stone, Ashley Woodfolk, and Nicola Yoon to write Blackout (2021).
Tara Conklin is a New York Times bestselling American author.
Monika Bittl was a German writer, journalist, screenwriter and lecturer of creative writing.
In graduate school at UH, minimalists like Raymond Carver and Amy Hempel were big influences on Center's style. But she gravitated toward David Sedaris-like subject matter — funny, off-the-wall stuff. "I really love writers who can make you laugh," she says. She has a two-book deal from Ballantine and is putting the finishing touches on her second novel, about a woman with three young sons who decides she needs to reconnect with aspects of her pre-mom identity. It's due next summer.
Katherine Center graduated from Vassar College, where she won the Vassar College Fiction Prize, and received an MA in fiction from the University of Houston. She served as fiction co-editor for the literary magazine Gulf Coast, and her graduate thesis, Peepshow, a collection of stories, was a finalist for the Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction. A former freelancer and teacher, she lives in Houston with her husband and two young children.
The theme I seem to come back to is how we pick ourselves back up after life has knocked us down. And it's because I'm not really good at that. It's very easy for me to be like, 'Well, it's hopeless' and throw myself on the floor. So I am fascinated by how other people do it.
| International | |
|---|---|
| National | |
| Other | |
