About
Katherine Conner is a Lebanese-American writer from Mississippi. Her collection of short stories, The Hanged Man, is forthcoming from Black Lawrence Press in August, 2026.
Her collection has been named a finalist in a number of contests, including the St. Lawrence Book Award from Black Lawrence Press, the C. Michael Curtis Short Story Book Prize from Hub City Press, the Katherine Anne Porter Prize in Fiction, and the Iron Horse Literary Review First Book Prize.
Her short stories have appeared in several literary magazines, including West Branch, Pembroke Magazine, Willow Springs, Shenandoah, Copper Nickel, Blackbird, Fugue, Surreal South, The Chattahoochee Review, The Portland Review, Raleigh Review, and elsewhere. Additionally, her story, “Percipient,” won the Willow Springs Fiction Prize.
Featured Work
The Hanged Man
Against the surreal landscape of the deep south, three Lebanese-American sisters encounter their missing mother six years after she vanished from their lives. Georgia, now a ghost tour guide in the French Quarter, spots her mother’s face in the crowd of tour-goers. Virginia, a receptionist at a mental health facility in Mississippi, is sure her mother walks in one day and asks to be committed. Louise, a relay operator in Birmingham, hears her mother’s voice late one night on the line. Each of these encounters is fleeting, almost ghostly, ambiguous. Is it really her, their mother, the woman who packed their grandmother’s trousseau and walked out of their lives without a word all those years ago? Or is she a vision, a ghost, no more than a memory?
Steeped in the Southern Gothic tradition, in the vein of Flannery O’Connor, William Faulkner, and Jesmyn Ward, this atmospheric collection of linked stories explores our complex relationship with loss and our desperate search for meaning.
