Kate Horsley

Kate Horsley is an American historical novelist and short-story writer, born in Richmond, Virginia in 1952 and resident in New Mexico since 1977. She took a B.A. at the University of Richmond and an M.A. at Western Kentucky University, completing her thesis work in residence at Laguna Pueblo with Leslie Marmon Silko, then earned a Ph.D. in American Studies at the University of New Mexico in 1984. She has taught English and creative writing at Central New Mexico Community College in Albuquerque for more than thirty years, where she served as department chair from 1998 to 2000. She is a practicing Zen Buddhist.

Her seven novels and one short-fiction collection range across an unusual span of geography and time: sixth-century Ireland, fourteenth-century Ireland under the Black Death, the nineteenth-century American West, Belle Epoque Paris, and post-Reunification Central Europe. Her debut, Crazy Woman (La Alameda Press, 1992), reframed the captivity narrative among the Jicarilla Apache and was the first book La Alameda ever issued. A Killing in New Town (La Alameda, 1996) won the 1996 Western States Book Award for Fiction and the New Mexico Press Women Award for Fiction. Two Shambhala novels set in pre-modern Ireland followed: Confessions of a Pagan Nun (2001), narrated by a former Druid cloistered at the monastery of Saint Brigit, and The Changeling of Finnistuath (2003), about a peasant girl raised as a boy through the Plague years. Careless Love; or, The Land of Promise (University of New Mexico Press, 2003) and Black Elk in Paris (Trumpeter, 2006) followed, with the short-fiction collection X & O in 2012.

Between the Legs (JEF Books, 2015) is her one JEF title and her seventh book. It won the 2015 Kenneth Patchen Award for the Innovative Novel, chosen by judge James Chapman for the craft and originality of its writing and its sympathy for the human condition. The novel follows a couple from the Buchenwald concentration camp through Weimar, Prague, Vienna, and Lucerne to a Zen retreat in the Swiss Alps, carrying grief, addiction, and obsession, with Freud and Kafka in the background. She later published the memoir Magnificent Sorrow: A Memoir of Two Lives (2019).

This is the American Kate Horsley, the Albuquerque novelist, not the British crime and gothic novelist of the same name. Start with Between the Legs for the JEF stretch, or Confessions of a Pagan Nun for the earlier historical work.