Katharine Beutner is an associate professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee; previously, she taught in Ohio and Hawai`i. Her second novel, Killingly, is now available from Soho Crime. Her writing has also appeared in Tinfish, Los Angeles Review of Books, Public Books, The Toast, TriQuarterly, Humanities, and other publications. Recently, she received an Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award. She is the editor in chief of The Dodge, a magazine of eco-writing and translation.
Praise for Alcestis [A]n engaging, subversive reimagining of the tale of the eponymous Greek heroine who is upheld as a shining example of the dutiful wife for her selfless sacrifice. Katharine Buetner's Alcestis is a far more willful heroine, and her encounters with the gods of the underworld resonate with a genuine sense of the numinous. -Jacqueline Carey, Namaah's Kiss and Kushiel's Dart In the tradition of great retellings like Mary Renault's The King Must Die or Ursula K. LeGuin's Lavinia, Beutner helps us re-see the familiar . . . Beutner brings scholarly rigor and feminista analysis to her portrayal of life as a royal Greek woman in the Bronze Age . . . Impossible to put down . . . Alcestis is nobody's celebratory gayed-up Greek myth (for that, try Ovid). Instead, Beutner's retelling is resolutely queer: strange, beautiful, ambivalent, sexually fluid, full of human complexity and godly simplicity. -Andrea Lawlor, Lambda Literary Everyday life in the ancient world, a no-escape-clause afterlife in the underworld, vulnerable mortals, and passionate and tormented gods-all are imagined with intense actuality in a novel that is as intoxicating and hypnotic as the sacred smoke inhaled by the oracles. -Elizabeth Knox, author of The Absolute Book The piquant novel is as alluring as Persephone's pomegranates; its protagonist as exceptional as Beutner's vision. -ForeWordMagazine Powerful, despairing . . . Beutner has taken loss and sadness, sharpened them, and shaped them into a tale at once profound and daring in what it refuses to give its readers. This is the dawn of an extremely promising career. -Open Letters Monthly Beutner renders her multilayered heroine with beauty and delicacy, and concerns herself with no less than the intricacies of the soul. -Publishers Weekly Beutner spices up this classic tale with a decidedly Sapphic flavor. -Booklist Intriguingly imagined, with prose both lyrical and engaging. -Historical Novels Review