about

Catherine Gammon is a fiction writer and Soto Zen priest. Her most recent book is the 2024 story collection The Gunman and the Carnival from Baobab Press. Her novels are The Martyrs, The Lovers (55 Fathoms, 2023), China Blue (Bridge Eight Press, 2021), Sorrow (Braddock Avenue Books, 2013) and Isabel Out of the Rain (Mercury House, 1991). Her early story collection is Beauty and the Beast (lulu.com, 2012).
Catherine’s fiction has been published in literary magazines since 1977, including in Ploughshares, Kenyon Review, Iowa Review, New England Review, Cincinnati Review, The Missouri Review, and many others. Her work has received support from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, and the American Antiquarian Society, among others, as well as from colonies including the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Yaddo, and Djerassi.
After growing up in Los Angeles, Catherine lived in Berkeley, Yellow Springs, Iowa City, and Provincetown before moving to Brooklyn, where she lived for ten years, working most of that time at The New York Review of Books. In 1992, she joined the faculty of the University of Pittsburgh, before returning to California for residential training at San Francisco Zen Center’s Green Gulch Farm. Ordained in 2005 by Tenshin Reb Anderson, Catherine continued in residence and served as shuso, or head student, in 2010. She lives again in Pittsburgh, with a garden and a cat.
Current updates will be posted @nonabiding on Substack, where Catherine also occasionally publishes new short unclassifiables as Little Misfits.
To contact Catherine Gammon:
Thank you, Florian, for finding and posting the source of the words from Gertrude Stein.