Katherine Dunn

Katherine Karen Dunn (October 24, 1945 – May 11, 2016) was an American novelist, journalist, voice artist, radio personality, book reviewer, and poet from Portland, Oregon.

Dunn was born in Garden City, Kansas, in 1945.

She was the second-youngest of five siblings; her father left before she was two.

Her mother, Velma Golly, an artist from North Dakota, married a mechanic or/and fisherman from the Pacific Northwest.

The family moved often during her childhood.

She went to high school in Tigard, Oregon, and later attended Reed College in Portland on a full scholarship, but never graduated.

She suffered a difficult childhood due to poverty and a violent mother.

She left home for good when she was 17.

Poverty was an important element in her novels as well.

In college she majored in philosophy and then psychology.

During a Christmas break trip to Ashbury Heights in 1967 she met a man she would spend the next ten years with.

Together, they traveled to Mexico, Boston, Newfoundland, and Seville, where she finished Attic, then to Karpathos.

Dunn began her first novel Attic (1970) while studying at Reed College.

In the 1970s, she hosted a radio show on Portland's community radio station KBOO, during which she read short fiction by other authors.

She taught advanced classes in creative writing at Oregon's Lewis & Clark College and a graduate course in the same subject at Pacific University in Forest Grove, Oregon.

Dunn described her memory of when she began writing it in the late 1970s, walking to Portland's Washington Park Rose Garden, contemplating nature versus nurture and the genesis of the book with its publication in 1989.

It remains a strong seller, with over a half-million copies sold, never having gone out of print.

Here, she finished her second novel, Truck (1971), and became pregnant.

She gave birth to her son in Dublin, Ireland.

After living for seven years at various locations, they returned to Portland to stay "because there was a good alternative public school", namely the Metropolitan Learning Center.

She settled in the Nob Hill neighborhood, where she resided until her death.

Dunn waited tables in the morning before her son woke up, and tended bars at night, painted houses, and did voice-over work.

In 1981, Dunn began writing about boxing in Willamette Week.

Having fallen in love with the sport, she went on to cover the sport for a number of publications, including PDXS, The Oregonian, and The New York Times.

She has been described as "one of the better boxing writers in the United States".

She started boxing training in her 40s.

She was an editor and contributor for the online boxing magazine cyberboxingzone.com.

She is best known for her novel Geek Love (1989).

She was also a prolific writer on boxing.

Her third published novel was Geek Love (1989), and it was by far her best-known work.

It was a finalist for the National Book Award.

It was a finalist, also, for the Bram Stoker Award for first horror novel.

In 1989, Dunn announced that she was working on a new novel, entitled The Cut Man.

In the 1990s, Dunn wrote a regular column on boxing for PDXS, in which she at one time provided detailed criticism of Evander Holyfield's sportsmanship in his controversial fight with Mike Tyson.

As of 1999, she was still working on the project.

She won the Dorothea Lange—Paul Taylor Award in 2004 for her work on School of Hard Knocks: The Struggle for Survival in America's Toughest Boxing Gyms.

In 2008, it was reported that publisher Alfred A. Knopf had scheduled The Cut Man for release in September.

The novel remains unpublished.

Her essays on boxing were collected in her 2009 collection One Ring Circus: Dispatches from the World of Boxing.

An excerpt was published in the summer 2010 issue of The Paris Review under the title "Rhonda Discovers Art".