2024 Bombeck Workshop Faculty Kelly McMasters

Kelly McMasters is an essayist, professor, mother and former bookshop owner.

She is the author of the Zibby Book Club pick The Leaving Season: A Memoir-in-Essays (W.W. Norton, 2023) and co-editor of the American Booksellers Association national bestseller Wanting: Women Writing About Desire (Catapult, 2023). Her first book, Welcome to Shirley: A Memoir From an Atomic Town, was listed as one of Oprah’s Book Club’s top memoirs and is the basis for the documentary film The Atomic States of America, a 2012 Sundance selection. The anthology she co-edited with Margot Kahn, This Is the Place: Women Writing About Home (Seal Press, 2017), was a New York Times Editor’s Choice.

Her essays, reviews and articles have appeared in The American Scholar, The Atlantic, The New York Times, Oprah Daily, The Paris Review, River Teeth: A Journal of Narrative Nonfiction and Romper, among others.

She’s been nominated for both the Pushcart Prize and the Orion Book Award.

She is an associate professor of English and director of publishing studies at Hofstra University in New York.