Kate Hill Cantrill

Kate Hill Cantrill's writing has appeared in literary publications including Story Quarterly, Salt Hill, The Believer, Blackbird, QuickFiction, Mississippi Review, Smokelong Quarterly, Swink, and others. She has been awarded fellowships from the  Corporation of Yaddo, the Jentel Artists Residency, the Virginia Center for Creative Arts, and the James A. Michener Fund. She has taught fiction writing at The University of the Arts, The University of Texas, and the Sackett Street Workshop. She lives in Brooklyn where she curates the Rabbit Tales Reading and Performance Series and is completing a novel.

Praise for Walk Back from Monkey School

"Written in a style that is fluid and poetic, but controlled and precise, Kate Hill Cantrill delivers thirty-three stories that will quite simply knock you out. With compassion and intelligence, she captures the emotions, the brilliant missteps, the sometimes awful, but inevitable actions of the human heart in conflict with itself. Echoing words from one of Cantrill's stories, I will say of Walk Back from Monkey School: "How perfect is this, how very needed at this time."

—Kathy Fish, author of A Peculiar Feeling of Restlessness

“Cantrill writes from a tiny room filled with large, loud sounds: clicking dog claws and fluttering bird wings, sneezes and sudden coughs. The tension in this room insists the reader listens. In Cantrill's onomatopoetic prose, we hear the familiar sounds of dysfunctional families, love gone wrong, comic mishaps, private desires, and other transmissions from the places where we break. But throughout these sonic, sensitive stories, we also hear how we might heal.”

—Anthony Tognazzini, author of I Carry A Hammer In My Pocket For Occasions Such As These

“This debut collection is a constant surprise. There are tender, lyrical stories about longing and dogs and sick mothers and disoriented geese, and short pieces with jagged edges and daring rhythms about leaves and leaving, about fathers who swim laps in the ocean, and, everywhere, all day, children who notice.”

—Pia Z. Ehrhardt, author of Famous Father’s and Other Stories

“Like Pop Rocks mixed with Mexican Coke, Kate’s stories are snappy, flavorful, addictive, dangerous and made with real cane sugar, and a Mighty Mouse-mouth feel. An old Hungarian expression goes, “Kicsi a bors, de erős” (the pepper is small, but strong)—and that’s exactly the impact of Miss Cantrill’s micro-stories: short on words, long on potency.”

—Alex Smith, filmmaker, The Slaughter Rule and Winter in the Blood