About
Katherine Sharpe was born in Arlington, Virginia, and lived there until she headed off to Portland, Oregon to attend Reed College. At Reed she studied cultural anthropology and English literature; she graduated in 2001 with a BA in English, a snazzy Phi Beta Kappa handshake, and a lasting appreciation for Pabst Blue Ribbon beer and Douglas firs. (Thankfully, her appreciation for Gore-Tex outerwear turns out to have been purely situational.)
After that, she earned a master’s degree in English at Cornell University in Ithaca, a town whose grayness gives Portland’s a run for its money. After that, she worked in new media in New York City, first as the editor and community manager of Seed magazine’s popular ScienceBlogs.com website, and then as the online editor of DIY lifestyle rag ReadyMade.
She is now at work on her first book, a nonfiction-with-a-memoir-module about young people and antidepressants, to be published by HarperCollins in 2012.
Her writing has appeared in n+1, GOOD, Seed, the Washington Post Magazine, The Village Voice, The Brooklyn Rail, The L Magazine, and Mountain Man Dance Moves: The McSweeney’s Book of Lists, among others. From 2005 to 2008 she published a print zine called 400 Words, which was featured in Utne and Newsweek, and made the “McSweeney’s Recommends” list on McSweeneys.net.
Does this mixed bag of science writing, lifestyle writing, and reviews make her a generalist? Very well then, it makes her a generalist. Special areas of interest, though, include: health and medicine, mental life, social innovation, the environment, plastic. She spends a lot of time thinking about corporatization and its influence on just about everything.
She’s taught English composition at Cornell and at the Laboratory Institute of Merchandising in Manhattan; as all teachers must, she has tamed her fear of public speaking to a manageable level.
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