Author Spotlight: Kathleen Rooney

Author, editor, and professor Kathleen Rooney is up to something. Lots of things, as it turns out. She is the author of the non-fiction books For You, For You, I Am Trilling These Songs (2010), Live Nude Girl: My Life as an Object (2009), Reading with Oprah: the Book Club that Changed America (2008), the chapbook After Robinson Has Gone, (2011), and a poetry collection with the pronunciation-defying title Oniromance (an epithalamion) (2007).

Oh and, you know, a couple of other things: Rooney co-wrote two chapbooks and a full-length poetry collection with Elisa Gabbert, she's an editor and co-founder of Rose Metal Press, she's a visiting assistant professor at DePaul University where she teaches both undergraduate and graduate level courses in English, she's the writer-in-residence at Roosevelt University this year, she participates in the Chicago Poetry Brothel, and has been featured in basically every reading and literary event in the city at one point or another. So yeah. She's up to something all right. She's making me feel like if I wanted to keep up with her tempo of participation in the literary world I'd need to clone myself several times and obtain at least one H.G. Wells-style time machine.

Keeping in tradition with many of the other writers and editors I've had on the show, Rooney defies the sheer number of hours in a day by seemingly being everywhere at once, and not just in the perfunctory sense. She and her husband (the author Martin Seay) are constant fixtures of the literary world in Chicago and chances are if something cool is happening there on any given night, one or both of them will be there. She has an encyclopedic knowledge of good reading the way that one friend everyone has can always come up with the perfect song for any mood. I'm not afraid to say that she's suggested several of my favorite most recent reads, and if she happens to mention in passing that you should check out a particular book, my advice, friends, is to do so.

Incidentally, the word epithalamion means "a poem or song in honor of a bride and groom".