Kathleen Novak is a poet and writer who grew up on the iron mining range of northern Minnesota, the granddaughter of Italian and Croatian immigrants, and a graduate of the University of Minnesota. She is the author of the 2017 Minnesota Book Award finalist, Do Not Find Me, and its companion, The Autobiography of Corrine Bernard, A Novel, selected as a semifinalist for the Chautauqua Prize in 2019. Rare Birds, the highly praised story of her childhood neighborhood, came out in 2017, and Steel, a historical novel, won the Northeastern Minnesota award for best fiction in 2023. Come Back, I Love You (A Ghost Story) was selected for Regal House Publishing’s Petrichor Prize. Novak’s poems have been published in literary magazines nationally and have won recognition in contests as diverse as the AAUW and New York Public Radio. She lives in Minneapolis.