Katherine Dunn

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For other people called Katherine Dunn or Dunn or alternative spelling, see Catherine Dunn (disambiguation)
Katherine Dunn
Born
Katherine Karen Dunn

(1945-10-24)October 24, 1945
Garden City, Kansas, U.S.
DiedMay 11, 2016(2016-05-11) (aged 70)
Portland, Oregon, U.S.
NationalityAmerican
Alma materReed College
OccupationWriter
Years active1965–2016
Notable work
Geek Love
Spouse(s)Paul Pomerantz
Children1

Katherine Karen Dunn (October 24, 1945 – May 11, 2016) was a novelist, journalist, voice artist, radio personality, book reviewer, and poet from Portland, Oregon. She is best known for her novel Geek Love (1989). She was also a prolific writer on boxing.

Early life[]

Dunn was born in Garden City, Kansas, in 1945.[1] She was the second-youngest of five siblings; her father left before she was two. Her mother, Velma Golly, an artist from North Dakota, married a mechanic[2] or/and fisherman from the Pacific Northwest.[3] The family moved often during her childhood.[3] She went to high school in Tigard, Oregon, and later attended Reed College in Portland. She majored in philosophy and then psychology.[3]

Career[]

Dunn began her first novel Attic while studying at Reed. She left without graduating. During a Christmas break trip to Ashbury Heights in 1967 she met a man she would spend the next ten years with. Together, they traveled to Mexico, Boston, Newfoundland, and Seville, where she finished Attic, then to Karpathos. Here, she finished her second novel, Truck (1971), and became pregnant.[3] She gave birth to her son in Dublin, Ireland. After living for seven years at various locations, they returned to Portland to stay "because there was a good alternative public school", namely the Metropolitan Learning Center.[3] She settled in the neighborhood, where she resided until her death.[2]

Dunn waited tables in the morning before her son woke up, and tended bars at night, painted houses, and did voice-over work.[3] In the 1970s, she hosted a radio show on Portland's community radio station KBOO, during which she read short fiction by other authors. She taught advanced classes in creative writing at Oregon's Lewis & Clark College and a graduate course in the same subject at Pacific University in Forest Grove, Oregon.[4]

In 1981, Dunn began writing about boxing in Willamette Week. Having fallen in love with the sport, she went on to cover the sport for a number of publications, including PDXS,[5] The Oregonian, and The New York Times.[6] She has been described as "one of the better boxing writers in the United States".[7] She started boxing training in her 40s.[2]

She was an editor and contributor for the online boxing magazine cyberboxingzone.com. In the 1990s, Dunn wrote a regular column on boxing for PDXS , in which she at one time provided detailed criticism of Evander Holyfield's sportsmanship in his controversial fight with Mike Tyson.[8] She won the Dorothea Lange—Paul Taylor Award in 2004 for her work on School of Hard Knocks: The Struggle for Survival in America's Toughest Boxing Gyms.[9] Her essays on boxing were collected in her 2009 collection One Ring Circus: Dispatches from the World of Boxing.[10]

A novel, Geek Love, by far her best-known work, was published in 1989. It was a finalist for the National Book Award. It was a finalist, also, for the Bram Stoker Award for first horror novel. Dunn described her memory of when she began writing it in the late 1970s, walking to Portland's Washington Park Rose Garden, contemplating nature versus nurture and the genesis of the book with its publication in 1989.[3]

In 1989, Dunn announced that she was working on a fourth novel, entitled The Cut Man.[11] As of 1999, she still worked on the project.[12] In 2008, it was reported that publisher Alfred A. Knopf had scheduled The Cut Man for release in September.[7] The novel remains unpublished. An excerpt, entitled "Rhonda Discovers Art", was published in the summer 2010 issue of The Paris Review[6] under the title Rhonda Discovers Art.[13] In 2012, Dunn reunited with Paul Pomerantz, her boyfriend from Reed College, and they married.[2]

Dunn died on May 11, 2016. Her son stated her death was from complications of lung cancer.[14][5]

Bibliography[]

Fiction[]

Novels[]

  • Attic (1970)
  • Truck (1971)
  • Geek Love (1989)
  • Toad (Fall 2021)[15]

Short fiction[]

  • 3 day fox : a tattoo (1979) (chapbook)
  • "The Resident Poet" - published in The New Yorker on May 4, 2020
  • Short story collection, title TBA (Fall 2022)[16]

Nonfiction[]

  • The Slice: Information with an Attitude (1989)
  • Death Scenes: A Homicide Detective's Scrapbook (1996) (linking text for photography collection)
  • "An Introduction to Lucius Shepard". The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. 100 (3): 4–10. March 2001.
  • One Ring Circus: Dispatches from the World of Boxing (2009)

References[]

  1. ^ "Katherine (Karen) Dunn." Contemporary Authors Online. Detroit: Gale, 2005. Biography In Context. Web. 5 Oct. 2013.
  2. ^ Jump up to: a b c d SAM ROBERTS (14 May 2016). "Katherine Dunn, Author of 'Geek Love,' Dies at 70". NY Times. Retrieved 19 May 2016.
  3. ^ Jump up to: a b c d e f g Roper, Caitlin (April 2, 2014). "Geek Loved". Willamette Week.
  4. ^ "Geek Love Begets More Love Through Pacific University's Katherine Dunn Scholarship".
  5. ^ Jump up to: a b "Award-winning Portland writer Katherine Dunn dies at 70". Portland Tribune. May 12, 2016.
  6. ^ Jump up to: a b Cowles, Gregory (June 11, 2010). "The Return of Katherine Dunn". New York Times Paper Cuts Blog.
  7. ^ Jump up to: a b Starr, Karla (February 1, 2006). "But you promised!". Willamette Week. Archived from the original on October 10, 2007.
  8. ^ Dunn, Katherine., Defending Tyson, PDXS via cyberboxingzone.com, 1997-07-09, Retrieved on 2007-04-18.
  9. ^ Announcement of 2004 prize winners Archived 2007-08-12 at the Wayback Machine
  10. ^ Schaffner Press Website Archived 2011-07-16 at the Wayback Machine
  11. ^ The Guardian, April 1989
  12. ^ Buckingham, Matt (10 November 1999). "Whatever Happened To...?". Willamette Week. Archived from the original on 23 December 2010. Retrieved 2013-09-03.
  13. ^ Dunn, Katherine (2010). "Rhonda Discovers Art". The Paris Review. Archived from the original on 2010-07-03.
  14. ^ Jaquiss, Nigel (May 12, 2016). "Katherine Dunn, Author of Geek Love, Dies at 70". Willamette Week.
  15. ^ Huffman, Naomi. "Katherine Dunn's Forgotten Fiction". www.mcdbooks.com/. MCD Books. Retrieved 4 August 2021.
  16. ^ Temple, Emily. "Attention: we are getting TWO new Katherine Dunn books". LitHub. Lithub.com. Retrieved 21 May 2020.

External links[]

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