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 writes fiction, poetry, and essays attentive to rupture, endurance, and the lived consequences of power. Her books include the poetry collection Sacrificial Steel (Driftwood Press), winner of the Driftwood Editors’ Pick Poetry Prize; the essay collection Writing Is Revision (Brill); the novel These Lowly Objects (Gold Wake Press); and the story collection True Places Never Are, winner of the Moon City Press Short Fiction Award.

Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in North American Review, Shenandoah, Glimmer Train, SmokeLong Quarterly, Flash Fiction International (W. W. Norton), Tahoma Literary Review, Crab Orchard Review, Citron Review, BULL, Trampset, and elsewhere.

Among other honors, her writing has received the Gold Wake Press Novel Award, the Santa Fe Writers Project Literary Award, the Kentuckiana Prize in Poetry, and the Porter Fleming Awards in Poetry and Fiction, along with the Glimmer Train Very Short Fiction Prize (second place), the Oxford Flash Fiction Prize (second place), and finalist recognition for the Lascaux and Wandering Aengus Book Awards. Her work has also earned multiple Pushcart Prize nominations across poetry and fiction, and individual pieces have been selected for Wigleaf’s Top 50 Very Short Fictions and nominated for Best Small Fictions.

McGowan holds an MFA, a PhD, and an MA in Writing from Johns Hopkins University. She has taught creative writing, literature, and composition for more than twenty years and currently works as a writing mentor and instructor. She lives in Florida with her husband and a willful, unruly assortment of pets and still misses her home state of Georgia.