Kim Henderson
Kim Henderson is the author of The Kind of Girl, a chapbook that won the Seventh Annual Rose Metal Press Short-Short Chapbook Contest. Deb Olin Unferth, author of Revolution, and judge for the contest, “When you sit down to read this lovely set of idiosyncratic meditations and narrations and observations, you will find that, from the first sentence, Kim Henderson has her tensions in place: “We were thirteen and it was the summer of ugliness.” Yes, we all remember that year—the year before it all went wrong, right? In Henderson’s world, every detail is full of the dramatic luminosity of that age…”
In an interview with The Rappahannock Review, Henderson reflects on her inspiration behind the stories in The Kind of Girl and her experience teaching creative writing. She shared, “I teach high school students who come to Idyllwild Arts specifically to study writing, so I am very lucky to teach what I love and to work with students who are passionate and dedicated. I find that much of the time, my writing fuels my teaching, and my teaching fuels my writing. I am often energized by my students’ excitement and willingness to experiment, and whenever I am learning something new or facing a fresh challenge as a writer, my experiences bleed into my teaching. I think and hope that staying engaged as a teacher and writer keeps me from becoming stagnant in each area.”
Henderson has won The Southeast Review’s World’s Best Short-Short Story Contest and has received two Honorable Mentions in the Glimmer Train Very Short Fiction Contest. Her story, “House of Clay”, won the 2019 Tillie Olsen Short Story Award and appeared in the October 2019 issue of The Tishman Review. Her stories have appeared in Kenyon Review, Missouri Review, Tin House, Southeast Review, Tupelo Quarterly, The Texas Observer, Atticus Review, New South, The Missouri Review, Catapult, Cutbank, River Styx, and elsewhere. Henderson received her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Montana. She taught for two years at the Young Writers Institute at the Chautauqua Institution
Originally from a small town in New Mexico, Henderson now lives precariously on a mountain in Southern California, in an even smaller town with her husband. She works with talented high school writers as chair of the Creative Writing Department at Idyllwild Arts Academy. Currently, she is at work on a short story collection and a novella-in-flash.
Updated June 2022