Photo by Averie Cole

Katherine Dykstra is a writer, editor and teacher. She holds an MFA in creative writing from the New School University. She is currently on the faculty of the Mountainview low-residency MFA program. Prior to that she served as senior nonfiction editor at Guernica magazine for many years, taught narrative nonfiction in NYU's continuing studies program and was a Writer in Residence at Monmouth University.

Her essays have been published in The New York Times Book Review, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, Poets and Writers, Real Simple, New Jersey Monthly, Guernica, Crab Orchard Review, The Common, Shenandoah, Gulf Coast, Brain, Child, and the Random House anthology 20 Something Essays by 20 Something Writers, among other places.

Her work has been included in the "Notables" section of both the 2015 and 2016 Best American Essays collections. She was one of three finalists for the 2014 John Guyon Literary Nonfiction Prize. She won first place in the 2012 Waterman Fund Essay Contest and placed third in the 2013 Real Simple Life Lessons Essay Contest.

She was recently named an "artist to watch" by Creative Capital for her work on the Paula Oberbroeckling story, the topic of her debut nonfiction book WHAT HAPPENED TO PAULA: AN UNSOLVED DEATH AND THE DANGER OF AMERICAN GIRLHOOD (W.W. Norton). The book was given a star and a box by Publisher’s Weekly and was included on best of summer lists in The New York Times, The New York Times Book Review, People magazine, The Boston Globe, The Chicago Tribune, and others. CrimeReads named it one of the ten best books of 2021.