Baker Artist Portfolios

Kathy Flann is an award-winning prose writer, whose work includes humor, nonfiction, and fiction. Her humor book – How to Survive a Human Attack: A Guide for Werewolves, Mummies, Cyborgs, Ghosts, Nuclear Mutants, and Other Movie Monsters (Running Press) – was featured in The New York Times/Wirecutter article, “The Gifts We Want to Give.” It was also featured as a “Scary Book of the Week” on the Hachette Novel Suspects site, where an excerpt appeared, a chapter entitled “The 6(66) Habits of Highly Effective Witches.” Her short humor pieces have been published in The Boston Globe, The Baltimore Sun, McSweeney’s, Weekly Humorist, Points in Case, The Belladonnas, Greener Pastures, The Haven, Southern Humanities Review, and more.

Flann's "serious work" includes a memoir project on the topic of grief, excerpts of which have appeared as personal essays in The Washington Post, Slate, The Gettysburg Review, and elsewhere. A piece about grief's impact on her romantic life won a contest at Sunspot Lit and is forthcoming in 2024.

Also a fiction writer, she has published two short story collections. Smoky Ordinary won the Serena McDonald Kennedy Award and was published by Snake Nation Press/Valdosta University. A second collection, Get a Grip, received the George Garrett Fiction Prize and was published by Texas Review Press. Get a Grip was named one of the Best Books of the Year by Baltimore Magazine, and it won the short story category of The Best Book Awards, The International Book Award, and the National Indie Excellence Award. Her short stories have appeared in Shenandoah, The North American Review, Blackbird, The Michigan Quarterly Review, and other publications.

Her advice columns for aspiring writers appeared quarterly for several years at Stay Thirsty Magazine, and eventually, Stay Thirsty Publishing collected them into a book entitled Write On: Secrets to Crafting Better Stories.

Honors include a Baker Artist Award, as well as grants from the Maryland State Arts Council and the Baltimore Office of Promotion & the Arts. She’s been a fellow at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Sozopol Fiction Seminars in Bulgaria, and Le Moulin a Nef in France.

Teaching has always been part of her creative life. Early in her career, Flann served as a Senior Lecturer and Course Leader of creative writing at the University of Cumbria in England. During that time, she also created mini-courses for the BBC's Get Writing website and served on the board of the National Association of Writers in Education. After a move to Baltimore, Maryland, she taught creative writing at Goucher College for many years. Currently, she teaches graduate-level creative writing within Advanced Academic Programs at Johns Hopkins University.

She grew up in the Washington, DC area and went on to study literature and writing at Virginia Tech, Auburn University, and UNC-Greensboro. She lives with her husband, her son, and an 11-pound Yorkie-poo.