About

Kate Portrait Cropped

Photo credit: Elisabeth Smolarz.

I am a Washington Post columnist and author of We of Little Faith: An Atheist Comes Clean (And Why You Should, Too), forthcoming from Godine. 

When I was a child, I had to write essays for my allowance–$1 per page–which suggested a link between writing and money that I have been trying to substantiate ever since.

I wrote my first book, The Neppi Modona Diaries (UPNE), soon after receiving my bachelor’s degree in Comparative Literature at Dartmouth College. The Neppi Modona Diaries tells the sometimes conflicting stories of a family of Jews who suffered under Fascist racial laws in Italy and went into hiding to survive the Nazi invasion. It also explores my own perspective as a post-Holocaust, non-believing Jew at the end of the twentieth century.  In A Walk Down the Aisle: Notes on a Modern Wedding, I chronicled my wedding to a man with whom I had lived for eight years, carefully examining the American wedding ritual, as hard to resist as it is functionally outdated.

You can find my author page at The Washington Post here. Sign up here to receive an email when a new column comes out. My essays can also be found in Slate, Salon, Fine Cooking, Bustle, Buzzfeed, Brain Child Magazine, and The Forward. You can hear me on 51%, a nationally syndicated public radio show about women, and WAMC’s The Roundtable and Midday Magazine. I live on a farm in Albany, New York. 

✶✶✶

If you’re interested in my writings, my upcoming book, or my new and improved website, please leave your name and email and I’ll make sure to get in touch.