Katherine Shonk is the author of Happy Now? (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2010), a novel set in Chicago, and The Red Passport (FSG, 2003), a short story collection set in Russia. Her writing has appeared in Tin House, Best American Short Stories 2001, StoryQuarterly, The Georgia Review, The Moscow Times, The Chicago Tribune, Cicada, and elsewhere. She has received an award and a fellowship from the Illinois Arts Council, and The Red Passport was a Chicago Tribune Best Book of the Year. Shonk lives in her hometown of Evanston, Illinois with her husband and daughter and has worked long-distance for many years as a writer and editor for Harvard University.
On the personal origins of her novel, Thicker Than Blood: “[It] started with the idea of that letter and why someone would keep a letter that no one would be allowed to read.”
