Kendra Patterson is a social scientist and writer. Storytelling has been her special interest since childhood—she wrote her first novel at ten years old, featuring tiny people who lived in her mother’s split-leaf philodendron. This early fascination with different worlds took her overseas in her late teens and twenties, to Italy, China, Japan, and Australia. Along the way she completed her bachelor’s and master’s degrees, writing her thesis on how economic and political power influence gendered cultural narratives. Upon returning to the States in her late twenties, she worked as a research associate at a Washington DC-based think tank, and later earned a PhD in international relations, focusing her dissertation on how national identity narratives inform international water conflict. During these years Kendra never stopped writing fiction, mainly short stories, but in midlife she decided to return to her first love: novels. She writes upmarket feminist fiction with strong mysteries and a speculative edge.
A common theme across Kendra’s work, both academic and fiction, is how stories become the realities we inhabit. She investigates the often-hidden cultural structures that determine who has the power to tell stories—i.e. decide what’s real—and who has to live within the narratives created by others. In her novels, Kendra explores how stories shape our concepts of self and what is possible in our most intimate relations, and specifically what happens when women start telling their own stories.
Outside of writing she is a nature and animal lover, and shares her life with dogs, cats, and backyard chickens. She enjoys experimenting in the kitchen, particularly with dishes inspired by the countries where she has lived, and is currently learning watercolor painting—she has no natural talent for it but nevertheless stubbornly persists. She is diagnosed AuDHD and produces a podcast, Stepping Off Now, that provides support for other neurodivergent writers. Originally a Delaware girl, Kendra now lives in humid north-central Florida in an old bungalow surrounded by Spanish moss-choked oaks and loblolly pines.