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by Kathleen Williams Renk
by Kathleen Williams Renk
Kathleen Williams Renk re-imagines the life of novelist Kate Chopin.
In 1850s' St. Louis, five-year-old Katy O’Flaherty’s father sends her to a strict convent school to stifle her precocious nature. Thus begins the life of the girl who becomes a progressive, feminist, “new woman” writer who shocks the world with her novel The Awakening, which Willa Cather derided as the “Creole Bovary.”
Kate O'Flaherty Chopin spent her childhood in St. Louis during the Civil War where she witnessed enslaved people sold on the courthouse steps. Raised by courageous women, including a French great-grandmother who ran trading boats on the Mississippi and who believed in justice for all, it's no surprise that Kate grew into a woman who rode bareback, smoked cigarettes, dressed audaciously, and wrote about taboo topics. In other words, she defied every expectation for women in the middle-late Victorian period.
Experience the vibrant and colorful world along the Mississippi and the unique Louisiana 1800s' culture that permeates Chopin's writings and her approach to life.
Details
Details
Bink Books
254 pp ● 6x9
$19.95 (pb) ● $9.99 (eb)
ISBN 978-1-960373-85-4 (pb)
FICTION / Feminist
FICTION / Southern
FICTION / Women
Publication date: July 14, 2026
Kathleen Williams Renk taught British and Women's literature for nearly three decades in the U.S. and abroad. Her scholarly books include Caribbean Shadows and Victorian Ghosts: Women’s Writing and Decolonization (Univ. Press of Virginia,1999), Magic, Science, and Empire in Postcolonial Literature: The Alchemical Literary Imagination (Routledge, 2012), and Women Writing the Neo-Victorian Novel: Erotic "Victorians" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020). While earning her Ph.D. in English at the University of Iowa, Williams Renk studied fiction writing with James Alan MacPherson. Her short fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry have appeared in Iowa City Magazine, Literary Yard, Page and Spine, CC & D Magazine, and the Scarlet Review. In November 2020, Cuidono Press (Brooklyn) published her debut novel, Vindicated: A Life of Mary Shelley. Vindicated won Story Circle Network’s 2021 May Sarton Award in Historical Fiction; it was also a finalist for the CIBA Goethe Award and was longlisted for the Chautauqua Literary Prize.
In her spare time, Williams Renk plays violin and guitar. She also loves to hike on the Front Range in Colorado where she lives.
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