Skip to main content

Kathleen Rooney

Biography

Kathleen Rooney

Kathleen Rooney is a founding editor of Rose Metal Press, a nonprofit publisher of literary work in hybrid genres, as well as a founding member of Poems While You Wait, a collective of poets and their vintage typewriters who compose poetry on demand. Her most recent books include the novels LILLIAN BOXFISH TAKES A WALK and CHER AMI AND MAJOR WHITTLESEY. Her poetry collection WHERE ARE THE SNOWS won the 2021 X.J. Kennedy Prize and was published by Texas Review Press in Fall of 2022.

A winner of the Ruth Lilly Prize from Poetry magazine and the Adam Morgan Literary Citizen Award from the Chicago Review of Books, her criticism appears in The New York Times, The Minneapolis Star Tribune, The Brooklyn Rail, Chicago Magazine, The Los Angeles Review of Books and elsewhere. She lives in Chicago with her spouse, the writer Martin Seay, and teaches English and Creative Writing at DePaul University.

Books by Kathleen Rooney

by Kathleen Rooney - Fiction, Historical Fiction, Women's Fiction

Chicago, 1916. Doreen O’Dare is 14 years old when she hops a Hollywood-bound train with her beloved Irish grandmother. Within a decade, her trademark bob and insouciant charm make her the preeminent movie flapper of the Jazz Age. But her success story masks one of relentless ambition, tragedy and the secrets of a dangerous marriage. Her professional life in flux, Doreen trades one dream for another. She pours her wealth and creative energy into a singular achievement: the construction of a one-ton miniature Fairy Castle, the likes of which the world has never seen. So begins Doreen’s public tour to lift the nation’s spirits during the Great Depression --- and a personal journey worth remembering.

by Kathleen Rooney - Fiction, Historical Fiction

From the green countryside of England and the gray canyons of Wall Street come two unlikely heroes: one a pigeon and the other a soldier. Answering the call to serve in the war to end all wars, neither Cher Ami, the messenger bird, nor Charles Whittlesey, the army officer, can anticipate how their lives will briefly intersect in a chaotic battle in the forests of France, where their wills will be tested, their fates will be shaped, and their lives will emerge forever altered.

by Kathleen Rooney - Fiction

She took 1930s New York by storm, working her way up writing copy for R.H. Macy’s to become the highest paid advertising woman in the country. Now it’s the last night of 1984 and Lillian, 85 years old but just as sharp and savvy as ever, is on her way to a party. It’s chilly enough out for her mink coat, and Manhattan is grittier now, but the quick-tongued poetess has never been one to scare easily. On a walk that takes her over 10 miles around the city, she meets bartenders, bodega clerks, security guards, criminals, children, parents and parents-to-be, while reviewing a life of excitement and adversity, passion and heartbreak, illuminating all the ways New York has changed --- and has not.