Katherine Karen Dunn (October 24, 1945 – May 11, 2016) was an American novelist, journalist, voice artist, radio personality, book reviewer, and poet from Portland, Oregon. She is best known for her novel Geek Love (1989). She was also a prolific writer on boxing.
Early life
Dunn was born in Garden City, Kansas, in 1945. She was the second-youngest of five siblings; her father left before she was two. Her mother, Velma Golly, an artist from North Dakota, married a mechanic or/and fisherman from the Pacific Northwest. The family moved often during her childhood. She suffered a difficult childhood due to poverty and a violent mother. She left home for good when she was 17. Poverty was an important element in her novels as well. In college she majored in philosophy and then psychology.
In 1981, Dunn began writing about boxing in Willamette Week. Having fallen in love with the sport, she went on to cover the sport for a number of publications, including PDXS, The Oregonian, and The New York Times. She has been described as "one of the better boxing writers in the United States". She won the Dorothea Lange—Paul Taylor Award in 2004 for her work on School of Hard Knocks: The Struggle for Survival in America's Toughest Boxing Gyms. Her essays on boxing were collected in her 2009 collection One Ring Circus: Dispatches from the World of Boxing.
Her third published novel was Geek Love (1989), and it was by far her best-known work. It was a finalist for the National Book Award. It was a finalist, also, for the Bram Stoker Award for first horror novel. Dunn described her memory of when she began writing it in the late 1970s, walking to Portland's Washington Park Rose Garden, contemplating nature versus nurture and the genesis of the book with its publication in 1989. As of 1999, she was still working on the project. In 2008, it was reported that publisher Alfred A. Knopf had scheduled The Cut Man for release in September. The novel remains unpublished. An excerpt was published in the summer 2010 issue of The Paris Review
In 2012, Dunn reunited with Paul Pomerantz, her boyfriend from Reed College, and they married. It was rejected by other publishers in years following, and after 1979 she set the book aside. It was only published because it was found in her archives at Lewis & Clark College by Naomi Huffman, an editor. Dunn's son and others pushed to have this work finally published. Another short story, "The Education of Mrs. R." was published by The Paris Review in 2022. Near Flesh, a book of her short stories, was published in 2025.
Short stories
- 3 day fox : a tattoo (1979) (chapbook)
- "The Resident Poet" - published in The New Yorker on May 11, 2020
- "The Education of Mrs. R." - published in The Paris Review Fall 2022 issue
- Near Flesh (short story collection) (7 October 2025)
Nonfiction
- The Slice: Information with an Attitude (1989)
- Just as Fierce. Mother Jones. Nov/Dec 1994.
- Call of the Wild. Vogue. June 1995.
- Death Scenes: A Homicide Detective's Scrapbook (1996) (linking text for photography collection)
- One Ring Circus: Dispatches from the World of Boxing (2009)
References
External links
- On the Beauty of Violence. Mateo Hoke interviews Katherine Dunn June 9, 2009, Guernica Magazine about her new book One Ring Circus
- What the Hell Ever Happened to... Katherine Dunn? LitReactor, 2012
- Katherine Dunn in The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction
- 'Geek Love' Author Katherine Dunn Dies at 70 May 16, 2016, NPR, All Things Considered.
- Geek Love Author Katherine Dunn Dies at 70 Dan Kois, May 12, 2016, Slate.com
- “Geek Love” author Katherine Dunn dead at 70 Washington Post, Associated Press, 13 May 2016
- Katherine Dunn has died; the 'Geek Love' author once took the world by storm, Carolyn Kellogg, May 12, 2016, Washington POst