Born and raised in eastern North Carolina, Kat Meads thought the Atlantic Ocean was the be-all-end-all until she gazed upon its Pacific counterpart and began to wrestle with divided loyalties. According to her (imperfect) memory: the first book that stunned and amazed her was Wuthering Heights; the second was The Geographical History of America. By age twelve, she had seen Paul Green’s The Lost Colony a dozen times. At age seventeen, attending NC’s Governor’s School, she saw a performance of Peter Weiss’s The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade that upended all her notions of what theater was and could be. At UNC-Chapel Hill, she first imagined she wanted to be a journalist, then a psychologist. Meanwhile she kept writing, writing: dreadful poems, execrable plays and (marginally better) short fiction. A fellowship to the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown decided her fate. Convinced she might at any moment freeze to death in her sublet-ed, severely under-heated cottage, she tossed everything she’d written prior to that moment and started again. She still likes to toss stuff but now calls the process “revision.”
Kat Meads is the award-winning author of 20 books and chapbooks of prose and poetry, including: 2:12 a.m.; Not Waving; For You, Madam Lenin; Little Pockets of Alarm; The Invented Life of Kitty Duncan; Sleep; and a mystery novel written under the pseudonym Z.K. Burrus, set on the Outer Banks. She also co-edited the fiction anthology Men Undressed: Women Writers on the Male Sexual Experience with Cris Mazza, Gina Frangello, and Stacy Bierlein.She has received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a California Artist Fellowship and two Silicon Valley artist grants. In addition to FAWC in Provincetown, she has been awarded artist residencies at Yaddo, Millay Colony, Dorland, and the Montalvo Center for the Arts. Her short plays have been produced in New York, Los Angeles, Berkeley and elsewhere. She is a multiple ForeWord Reviews Book of the Year finalist, and her essays have been selected as Notables in Houghton Mifflin Harcourt’s Best American Essays series. Her historical novel For You, Madam Lenin received an Independent Publishers’ Silver Medal and was shortlisted for the Montaigne Medal for thought-provoking literature. Her essay collection 2:12 a.m. received an Independent Publishers’ Gold Medal. Reviewers have described her work as “exquisite” (Historical Novels Review), “remarkable” (American Book Review) “smart and provocative” (Other Voices), “bold and beautiful” (Midwest Book Review), “riveting” (New Pages) and “worth reading for the dialogue alone” (Greensboro News and Record). (www.katmeads.com)
