Kate Carmody
Nonfiction
Denver, CO
Kate Carmody is a recipient of a CINTAS Foundations grant supporting artists born in Cuba or of Cuban descent. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in Potomac Review, Essay Daily, No Contact, Los Angeles Review, The Journal of Compressed Creative Arts, and Lunch Ticket, among others. She received her MFA from Antioch University in Los Angeles. While pursuing her MFA in creative nonfiction, she worked as a blogger, assistant blog editor, and the assistant lead editor for the youth spotlight series at Lunch Ticket.
Kate teaches writing through Hugo House, the Loft Literary Center, Austin Bat Cave, and Antioch’s Continuing Education Program. In 2012, she received the Facing History and Ourselves Margot Stern Strom Teaching Award and in 2017, was selected by Facing History and Ourselves to participate in a Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation grant-funded study to assess if peer-led professional development can improve teachers’ instruction of literacy standards.
At Ragdale, she’ll continue to work on her book-length essay, Family Piece. After her Cuban granddad, a frontline surgeon who landed on Omaha Beach on D-Day, gave her his WWII journals, she was inspired to explore his life and her Cuban heritage. Family Piece is an exploration of how her family’s immigrant story has affected her and how the national narrative and family narratives get mixed up in our identities. Family Piece is a book-length essay that explores the intersection of legacy, race, ethnicity, privilege, oppression, history, and mythology. It is a philosophical meditation and personal reflection on what binds—and separates—us as a family and as Americans. Family Piece is structured associatively rather than linearly, which allows her to mimic the way our minds work through complex issues and reminds readers about the slipperiness of memory. A shortened version of the first section of Family Piece is featured in Potomac Review’s current issue.
Kate lives in Denver, Colorado with her husband and dog. The three of them are in a band called Dadafacer.
Work Sample
Family Piece Excerpt
My granddad’s full name was René Antonio Eulogio Amado Jesus de la Caridad Torrado y Pruna, but he left everything in Cuba except Rene and Torrado, including his parents. When Castro took control, he urged them to move to Miami. “What’s one more dictator?” Abuela said.
Castro’s men showed up at my great-grandmother’s door while her husband Rudolfo was out. They tied Abuela to a chair and gagged her while ransacking the place. “If we find one gun,” they threatened, “we’ll kill you.” She prayed they wouldn’t search the barn. They didn’t. I imagine soldiers stuffing things in their pockets as they searched.