Trueblood, Kathryn 1960-

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Trueblood, Kathryn 1960-

PERSONAL:

Born February 27, 1960; children: two. Education: University of California at Berkeley, B.A.; Radcliffe Publishing Procedures Course, certificate; University of Washington, M.F.A.

ADDRESSES:

Home—Bellingham, WA. Office—English Department, Western Washington University, 516 High St., MS 9055, Bellingham, Washington 98225. E-mail—Kathryn [email protected].

CAREER:

Writer, editor, educator. Western Washington University, Bellingham, associate professor. Worked as program director for Before Columbus Foundation and as an editorial assistant at Random House and Shameless Hussy Press.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Jurors' Choice Award, Bumbershoot, the Seattle City Arts Festival, for Homeground; special mention for the Pushcart Prize, 2000, for The Sperm Donor's Daughter & Other Tales of Modern Family; Book Sense Pick, American Booksellers Association, 2007, for The Baby Lottery.

WRITINGS:

(Editor, with Ishmael Reed and Shawn Wong) The Before Columbus Foundation Fiction Anthology: Selections from the American Book Awards, 1980-1990, W.W. Norton (New York, NY), 1992.

(Editor, with Linda Stovall) Homeground, Before Columbus Foundation (Berkeley, CA), 1996.

The Sperm Donor's Daughter & Other Tales of Modern Family, Permanent Press (Sag Harbor, NY), 1998.

The Baby Lottery, Permanent Press (Sag Harbor, NY), 2007.

Contributor of short stories to magazines, including Poets & Writers Magazine, Rain Taxi Review of Books, Publishers Weekly, Seattle Weekly, Glimmer Train, Seattle Review, Cimarron Review, and Zyzzyva.

SIDELIGHTS:

A former publishing editor and a creative writing teacher, author Kathryn Trueblood focuses her fiction on tough social issues. Her short-story collection, The Sperm Donor's Daughter & Other Tales of Modern Family, deals with assisted reproduction, among other topics, while her 2007 novel, The Baby Lottery, tackles the thorny subjects of fertility treatments and a second trimester abortion. Part of her interest in reproductive subjects is the result of being the daughter of an obstetrician. During his residency, Trueblood's father worked in the labor-and-delivery ward of the Los Angeles County Hospital. This was in the time prior to the United States Supreme Court decision in Roe v. Wade, which made abortion legal. As Trueblood noted on her Web site, "A section of the floor was called the OB Infection Ward, a euphemism really, because it was where they sent patients with botched abortions if they didn't die first."

Trueblood's first foray into fiction, The Sperm Donor's Daughter & Other Tales of Modern Family, features the title novella, a story about a young pregnant woman who sets out in search of her own biological father. "Scattered families haunt the six stories of this muted debut about characters who search, mostly in vain, for relationships," commented a Publishers Weekly reviewer. Other stories deal with a married woman who reluctantly ends an affair, a widower who attempts a second marriage and second chance at love after the suicide of his wife, and one woman's reflections on her childhood relationship with her sibling.

Booklist contributor Mary Frances Wilkens termed Trueblood's debut novel, The Baby Lottery, "mainstream women's fiction." It deals with five female friends who met in college and are now approaching forty. Virginia, a writer, is recently separated and the mother of one son; Jean is also divorced, but childless, and discovers that her former husband now has a child with his new wife; Tasi does not have children either, the result of her devotion to career; Nan is also a professional, a nurse in an obstetric department, but is additionally the mother of two; and Charlotte, who is pregnant, propels the plot with her decision to have a late-term abortion. The news affects each of her friends in different ways, and the book is thus told from multiple points of view. Trueblood, on her Web site, commented on the reason for this: "I did not want this story to have one fixed angle on the issues it discusses. … That is, there is no easy way to take sides with the characters and, by the end, the book does not settle on one attitude toward the issues it discusses, but presents multiple perspectives."

The Baby Lottery received a positive review from Wilkens, who felt that the author's "sympathetic juggling between the various points of view proves an effective way of showing that simple formulas don't work for today's woman." However, a Kirkus Reviews critic was less enthusiastic about the book, calling it "excruciating." Bette-Lee Fox, writing in Library Journal, provided a higher assessment, terming the novel "a beautifully drawn yet harsh portrait of love in its varied permutations and how finding happiness really is a matter of chance."

Trueblood is also the coeditor of The Before Columbus Foundation Fiction Anthology: Selections from the American Book Awards, 1980-1990. Working with Shawn Wong and Ishmael Reed, Trueblood helped collect thirty selections from those awards, pieces which, according to a Publishers Weekly reviewer, "effectively demonstrate just how rich and diverse that literature is." Included in the anthology are writings from authors such as William Kennedy and Louise Erdrich. Working with Linda Stovall, Trueblood also helped to edit another multicultural anthology, Homeground, a gathering of essays, stories, and poetry from such writers as Pico Iyer and Shirley Geok-lin Lim.

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Booklist, May 15, 2007, Mary Frances Wilkens, review of The Baby Lottery, p. 19.

Journal of American Studies, December, 1994, Robert A. Lee, review of The Before Columbus Foundation Fiction Anthology: Selections from the American Book Awards, 1980-1990, p. 433.

Kirkus Reviews, April 1, 2007, review of The Baby Lottery.

Library Journal, June 15, 2007, Bette-Lee Fox, review of The Baby Lottery, p. 58.

Publishers Weekly, January 1, 1992, review of The Before Columbus Foundation Fiction Anthology, p. 52; February 9, 1998, review of The Sperm Donor's Daughter & Other Tales of Modern Family, p. 73.