Kathleen Rooney

Kathleen Rooney is a founding editor of Rose Metal Press, and a founding member of Poems While You Wait. Her latest novel, From Dust to Stardust, was published by Lake Union Press in September of 2023.

March 2026Books

SARA LEVINE with Kathleen Rooney

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If ever there were a character who could benefit by reading Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People—straight through, ASAP—it’s Rose Cutler, the dyspeptic protagonist of Sara Levine’s laugh-a-minute novel The Hitch. As the spiritual healer she eventually hires on behalf of her nephew observes, “You’re sincere but misguided” and also a “noodge.”

SARA LEVINE with Kathleen Rooney

October 2025Books

CAROLINE MACON FLEISCHER with Kathleen Rooney

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Caroline Macon Fleischer’s audaciously hybrid second novel, A Play About a Curse, does what it says on the tin. Rendered partly in traditional novelistic first-person and partly in script format following a classic three-act structure, Macon Fleischer’s mash-up of prose and drama delivers a bizarre tale of what ruthless ambition can drive a person to do.

CAROLINE MACON FLEISCHER with Kathleen Rooney

July/August 2025Books

MATTHEW GAVIN FRANK with Kathleen Rooney

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As a writer of creative nonfiction, Matthew Gavin Frank is the tour guide to end all tour guides, leading his readers through the weird and wonderful realms of what humans consume and what consumes them.

MATTHEW GAVIN FRANK with Kathleen Rooney

March 2025Books

JACLYN YOUHANA GARVER with Kathleen Rooney

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The Midwest Writers Workshop in Muncie, Indiana, is an annual summer conference full of talented and hardworking aspiring authors, and it’s where I had the pleasure of meeting Jaclyn Youhana Garver in July of 2022 when I was on the faculty. Jaclyn and I corresponded over email about grief, grape leaves, and how reading someone’s book is one of the sweetest possible things a person can do.

JACLYN YOUHANA GARVER with Kathleen Rooney

November 2023Books

James Kennedy with Kathleen Rooney

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James Kennedy’s depraved, hilarious, and genre-bending Midwestern horror coming-of-age novel Bride of the Tornado features voracious, sentient, animalic tornadoes wreaking havoc on a town less wholesome than first meets the eye.
James Kennedy with Kathleen Rooney

April 2023Books

John Cotter with Kathleen Rooney

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In advance of Losing Music’s April 2023 publication by Milkweed Editions, John and I talked by email about Anna Deavere Smith’s plays, Jonathan Swift’s skull, the destructiveness and discouragements of capitalism, and how—no matter the condition of the body that contains them—all souls weigh the same.
John Cotter with Kathleen Rooney

April 2022Books

Andrew Farkas with Kathleen Rooney

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The Great Indoorsman, published this month by University of Nebraska Press, is wry, absurdist, and absurdly amusing, with Farkas serving as a casual yet expert guide on a sublime tour of what he defines as the in-of-doors. Sure, they’re not lofty mountain peaks or oceans deep, but Farkas proves that dive bars and coffeehouses, dilapidated movie theaters and dying malls, waiting rooms and pool halls can reward our exploration all the same.
Andrew Farkas with Kathleen Rooney

November 2021Books

Logan Berry with Kathleen Rooney

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The publisher calls it “a textualized slasher—brought to you in moldy technicolor splendor—sure to fuel your nightmares for years to come,” and every page of Run-Off Sugar Crystal Lake delivers on that threatening promise. Berry and I corresponded over email in late summer of 2021, one of the hottest on record, and a time during which (like most of recorded history and like slasher movies themselves) human beings were inflicting astonishing violence upon one another with no signs of stopping.
Logan Berry with Kathleen Rooney

April 2021Books

Gina Frangello with Kathleen Rooney

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Frangello's books deal broadly with loyalty, sex, betrayal, interpersonal relationships, and the expectations placed on women in particular. Her latest work, the memoir-in-essays Blow Your House Down: A Story of Feminism, Family, and Treason (Counterpoint, 2021) offers an astonishingly forthright account of the darkest fallouts of attraction and dissolution.
Gina Frangello with Kathleen Rooney

July/August 2020Books

LEIGH STEIN with Kathleen Rooney

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Leigh Stein’s second novel, Self Care, examines the ambiguities inherent in its title concept, delivering a hilarious and scathing satire on the toxicity and contradictions of contemporary wellness culture and commodified feminism.
LEIGH STEIN with Kathleen Rooney

Dec/Jan 19–20Books

JILLIAN WEISE with Kathleen Rooney

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In her third poetry collection, Cyborg Detective (BOA Editions), writer, performance artist, and disability rights activist Jillian Weise (aka Tipsy Tullivan) offers work that is angry and funny, savvy and sad, and willing to criticize ableism in all its forms.
JILLIAN WEISE with Kathleen Rooney

September 2019Books

KIMBERLY J. SOENEN with Kathleen Rooney

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Are we healthy? Writer, educator, and curator Kimberly J. Soenen wants to hear your answers, and to get you to listen to the answers of other people. To facilitate this exchange and to humanize the healthcare debate, she has organized the ambitious and interdisciplinary group show “SOME PEOPLE” (Every)body, which will open at the Bridgeport Art Center in Chicago on October 18, 2019.

April 2019Books

GENNAROSE NETHERCOTT with Kathleen Rooney

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he poet and writer GennaRose Nethercott radiates a worldview that brings out the magic in everyday life, a magic she commits gorgeously to the page in her debut poetry book The Lumberjack's Dove, a sweetly surreal tale of grief, loss, and storytelling itself.
GENNAROSE NETHERCOTT with Kathleen Rooney

February 2019Books

JAMES CHARLESWORTH with Kathleen Rooney

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Some people are more like planets in the outsized pull they exert over the others whom they draw like satellites into their orbits. Such is the titular entrepreneurial egomaniac of James Charlesworth’s riveting and rangy debut novel, The Patricide of George Benjamin Hill, a captivating story of money and freedom, family and forgiveness, grand intentions and grave mistakes.
JAMES CHARLESWORTH with Kathleen Rooney

February 2014Books

THE BRUTALITY OF BELIEVING: Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore In Conversation with Kathleen Rooney

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A curriculum vitae-style list of Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore's many dazzling accomplishments gives you some sense of who she is as a writer, thinker, and queer anti-assimilationist activist.

November 2013Books

AUTOFORENSICS CRIS MAZZA with Kathleen Rooney

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The daring experimental feminist author Cris Mazza is not easily reduced to a collection of numbers, but here are some key stats: she is 57 years old, she is the author of 17 books, and she, like an estimated 15 percent of all women, is anorgasmic.

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