About

McGowan’s stories have all of the ferocity and precision of her fellow Georgian, Flannery O’Connor, but McGowan is more compassionate. And more hip. —Robin Lippincott

Cate McGowan is the author of Sacrificial Steel (Driftwood Press, 2025), winner of the Driftwood Editors’ Pick Poetry Prize; Writing Is Revision: Compositions from the Feminist Fringe (Brill, 2025); the novel These Lowly Objects; and the story collection True Places Never Are, winner of the Moon City Press Short Fiction Award and a finalist for the Lascaux Prize. Her work has appeared in Flash Fiction International (W. W. Norton), Glimmer Train, Shenandoah, North American Review, Tahoma Literary Review, Trampset, Chestnut Review, and elsewhere. Recent honors include second place in the Oxford Flash Fiction Prize and first place in Glossy Planet’s 2026 “Cult of Productivity” challenge.

She writes fiction, poetry, essays, and scholarship, moving where the material asks her to go. Her work often explores longing, grief, female anger, class, the odd comedy tucked inside daily life, and the ways beauty can complicate a sentence. Alongside her writing, she teaches, paints, sculpts, plays chess, and thinks a great deal about craft, pedagogy, and what writing makes possible as a way of paying attention to the world.

McGowan holds an M.F.A. and a Ph.D. and is currently pursuing additional graduate degrees at Johns Hopkins University, which may be a sign of deep curiosity or a mild inability to leave school gracefully. Based in Florida with her husband and an unruly committee of pets, she still misses her home state of Georgia, and every now and then her Southern accent slips back into the room.