Baker Artist Portfolios

      Kristina R. Gaddy is an award-winning writer who believes in the power of narrative nonfiction to bring stories from the past to life in order to inform the world we live in today. She is the author of three books of nonfiction, and is at work on two more. 

      Her new book A Most Perilous World: The True Story of the Young Abolitionists and Their Crusade Against Slavery (Dutton 2025) follows the four young adult children of prominent abolitionists (including the sons of Frederick Douglass and William Lloyd Garrison) in the years leading up to and during the Civil War in a coming-of-age-story about what it means to pass and carry the flame of resistance. In Well of Souls: Uncovering the Banjo's Hidden History (W.W. Norton 2022) Gaddy uncovers the banjo’s key role in Black spirituality, ritual, and rebellion in an extraordinary story that unfolds across two hundred years and three continents. Her debut nonfiction book Flowers in the Gutter (Dutton 2020) tells the true story of the teenage Edelweiss Pirates who fought the Nazis. Through narratives based on memoirs, oral history interviews, and Nazi documents, she immerses the reader in the world of these teenagers as they resist the Third Reich. 

     Gaddy is also the co-author with Grammy award winner and MacArthur Fellow Rhiannon Giddens of the forthcoming Go Back and Fetch It: Recovering Early Black Music for Fiddle and Banjo (UNC Press 2025). In this book, they've taken lesser-known and hard-to-access archival records and put them into treble-clef notation and banjo tablature, allowing today’s musicians to bring sounds once heard across the Americas to life, and combined that music with stories and histories of the music and Black musicians of the early Atlantic. 

     Her writing explores and highlights forgotten and marginalized histories. Her essay "Intersectional Landscapes" appears in A Harp in the Stars: An Anthology of Lyric Essays (University of Nebraska Press 2021).  In 2018, Kristina received a Robert W. Deutsch Foundation Ruby's Artist Award to support the writing and researching of Well of Souls.  She was also a 2019 Logan Nonfiction Fellow at the Carey Institute for Global Good and received a Parsons Award from the Library of Congress in 2020. In 2017, her story about a midwife in 1909 Baltimore was a finalist for Proximity Magazine's Narrative Journalism Prize. She co-wrote and co-produced a radio segment for the Marc Steiner Show on the legacy of one of Baltimore's most well-known Confederate monuments. 

     She holds an MFA in Nonfiction Writing from Goucher College and her work has appeared in The Washington Post, Baltimore magazine, Washington City Paper, Baltimore Sun, Bitch Magazine, Narratively, Proximity, Atlas Obscura, OZY, Shore Monthly and other smaller history and music publications.