How to Walk Away (Center) - Author Bio

Author Bio
• Birth—March 4, 1972
• Raised—Houston, Texas, USA
• Education—B.A., Vassar College; M.F.A., University of Houston
• Currently—lives in Houston, Texas


Katherine Center is the author of several contemporary novels about love and family. She graduated from St. John's School in Houston, Texas, and later earned her B.A. from Vassar College, where she won the Vassar College Fiction Prize.

She went on to receive her M.A. in fiction from the University of Houston. While in graduate school, she distinguised herself as a writer and editor: she co-edited Gulf Coast, a literary fiction magazine, and her graduate thesis earned her a spot as a finalist for the Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction.

Center is the author of 7 novels, starting in 2006 with: The Bright Side of Disaster. More recently she has published How to Walk Away (2018), which became a Book of the Month Club pick; Things to Save in a Fire (2019), and What You Wish For (2020). Center's work is often categorized as women's fiction, chick lit and mommy lit. She describes her books as "bittersweet comic novels."

Center currently lives in Houston, Texas, with her husband and two children.

Extras

• Along with Jeffrey Toobin and Douglas Brinkley, Center was one of the speakers at the 2007 Houston Chronicle Book and Author Dinner.
• Her first novel was optioned by Varsity Pictures.
• 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.
• As a speaker at the 2018 TEDx Bend, Center's talk was entitled, "We Need to Teach Boys to Read Stories About Girls."

  (Author bio adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 5/15/2018.)