Katharine Haake is a fourth generation Californian whose work reflects a deep engagement with the land, the people, and the history of this place. Her forthcoming eco fable, What Happened Was, inaugurates the new11:11 climate change fiction series, Nothing Exists Alone. Her forthcoming memoir-in-essays is the recipient of the inaugural Wolfson Prose Prize. 

 

Her other books include an eco-dystopian science fiction fable, The Time of Quarantine; a hybrid California prose lyric, That Water, Those Rocks; and three collections of stories: The Origin of Stars, the LA Times bestseller The Height and Depth of Everything, and the NY Times notable No Reason on Earth. Haake’s writing has long appeared in such magazines as One Story, The Iowa Review, Crazyhorse, New Letters, Witness, Alaska Quarterly Review, and Leonardo. It has been recognized as distinguished by Best American Short Stories, Best American Essays, and Best of the West, and received multiple nominations for the Pushcart Prize. A collaborative text/image piece she did with artist, Lisa Bloomfield, is included in Bloomfield’s portfolio in the permanent collection of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

Haake was also lead editor on a 2021 anthology, What Falls Away Is Always: Writers Over 60 on Writing and Death.

 

She is a well-known figure in the field of Creative Writing Studies, a long-time contributor to its scholarship and pedagogy, and the author of the foundational What Our Speech Disrupts: Feminism and Creative Writing Studies.

Haake remains deeply grateful to have benefitted, over the years, from residences at the Djerassi Foundation for the Arts/Scientific Delirium Madness, co-sponsored with Leonardo; the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts; Hedgebrook Cottages for Women; Ucross; and Montalvo Center for the Arts, as well from a 2005 Master Artist’s Fellowship from the Cultural Affairs Department of the City of Los Angeles. She is a Professor of Creative Writing at California State University, Northridge.