Kathryn “Kitsi” Watterson is the author of nine books, three of which are New York Times Notable Books of the Year. Her works include Women in Prison, which led to an ABC “Close Up” documentary, the founding of prisoner support organizations across the country, and ongoing scholarly study. Her creative nonfiction includes Not by the Sword, which won a 1996 Christopher Award and inspired a play and opera, and You Must Be Dreaming (coauthor), which exposes a world-famous psychiatrist who systemically drugged and sexually assaulted his patients. This Notable Book inspired the NBC movie Betrayal of Trust. Watterson’s short stories and essays have appeared in TriQuarterly, Writers’ Forum, Northeast Corridor, Santa Monica Review, and Fourth Genre, and her articles in The New York Times, The Philadelphia Inquirer and The International Herald Tribune. Her newest book, I Hear My People Singing: Voices of African-American Princeton, published by Princeton University Press (2017) with a foreword by Cornel West, “recasts American history as a whole by presenting in their own words the full lives of black Princetonians, lives forged within the utterly everyday Americanness of enslavement, segregation, and insult,” according to historian Nell Painter. I Hear My People Singing grew out of an oral history project that began in 1999, when Watterson enlisted her Princeton University students to help her and her neighborhood partners save the stories of a generation who had grown up in Princeton, NJ, where segregation was a way of life in the schools, restaurants, stores, and on campus. Their words, excerpted from fifty-five interviews, provide a living account that intimately connects the residents of the Witherspoon-Jackson community to the lives lived by their enslaved grandparents, great-grandparents and great-greats before them. At Penn, Watterson has hosted events at Kelly Writers House that include Reckoning with Torture, a film project of PEN and the ACLU, and One Hundred Thousand Poets for Change. She sings and drums with TheUnity, a popular improvisational music trio. She currently is at work on a novel set in Philadelphia and a short story collection.
ENGL 9017.640 Considering Race, Class & Punishment in the American Prison System
ENGL 9013.640 A Slice of Life: Memoir Writing
ENGL 135.601 Finding Voice: Perspectives on Race, Class & Gender
ENGL 9000.640 The Archeology of Fiction
ENGL 581.640 Learning from James Baldwin (1924-1987)
ENGL 515.640 Storytelling in Fiction and Creative Nonfiction
ENGL 516.640 Writing and Remembering: A Memoir Workshop
ENGL 135.601 Being Human: A Personal Approach to Race, Class & Gender
ENGL 435.640 The Site of Memory: A Writing Workshop
ENGL 457.640 The Art of the Interview
ENGL 145.601 The Art of the Personal Essay
ENGL 412.640 Writing in the Moment: A Writing Workshop
ENGL 135.601 Creative Non-Fiction Writing: Finding Voice
ENGL 115.601 Advanced Fiction Writing
ENGL 415.641 Learning from the Harlem Renaissance: A Writing Workshop