“Kathy Fish wields words with intimate precision and in doing so, she opens up the world in ways that can be exhilarating or devastating and always unforgettable.”
Roxane GayAuthor of Hunger & Bad Feminist
“There is no single author who pencils out how we live as people better than Kathy Fish. To read her fiction is to understand the human condition, in all its messy, bloody, luminescent, imperfect glory.”
Amber SparksAuthor of The Unfinished World: And Other Stories
“No one does compressed fiction like Kathy Fish. Her precision is unparalleled. Every detail, every line, every word does double, triple duty. Every beat is flawless.”
Sara LippmannAuthor of Doll Palace
“I’m convinced there are few living authors who are better at flash fiction than Kathy Fish.”
David AbramsAuthor of Fobbit
“Most of what I know about flash fiction I learned from reading Kathy Fish’s work. She’s a consummate master of the short form…”
Ravi ManglaAuthor of Understudies
“You have to write flash fiction to know how damn good Kathy Fish is, she makes it look so effortless. But it takes a lot of skill to produce the little gems she writes.”
Tara MasihAuthor of Where the Dog Star Never Glows

About Kathy

Email: fishfastflash@gmail.com

Substack: artofflashfiction.substack.com

Kathy Fish’s short stories, flash fiction, and prose poems have recently appeared in Ploughshares, Washington Square Review, Waxwing Magazine, Copper Nickel, the Norton Reader, and Best Small Fictions. Her fifth collection, Wild Life: Collected Works from 2003-2018, is now in its third print run with Matter Press. She is a recipient of the Copper Nickel Editor’s Prize. Her highly sought after flash fiction workshops, begun in 2015, have resulted in numerous publications and awards for the hundreds of writers who have taken part. Her work has been generously supported by the Ragdale Foundation and the Kerouac Project of Orlando. She publishes a bestselling newsletter, The Art of Flash Fiction, named one of the twenty best writing Substacks by Writers at Work. 

Other stories have appeared in Electric Literature, Wigleaf, Guernica, Denver Quarterly, Mississippi Review (online), Yemasseee Review, Indiana Review, Spork, Slice, New South, Newfound Journal and various other journals, textbooks, and anthologies. 

Her most widely shared, taught, and anthologized piece to date,“Collective Nouns for Humans in the Wild,”was written in response to the 2017 mass shooting in Las Vegas. The piece, which addresses the scourge of mass shootings and gun violence in America, was first published by Editor-in-Chief Christopher James in Jellyfish Review. It was then chosen by Sheila Heti for Best American Nonrequired Reading 2018 and by Aimee Bender for Best Small Fictions 2018. In Sept., 2019, the piece was adapted for the stage alongside an excerpt from Roxane Gay’s “Hunger” in “Bodies of…” produced by Matt Weedman and performed at the Bertha Martin Theater at the University of Northern Iowa. Variously described as a poem, flash fiction, prose poem, or flash essay/creative nonfiction, this hybrid piece has also been selected for Literature: A Portable Anthology (Macmillan), Stone Gathering: A Reader (French Press Editions), Humans in the Wild: Reactions to a Gun Loving Country (Swallow Publishing), Advanced Creative Nonfiction: A Writer’s Guide and Anthology, (Bloomsbury), and the 15th edition of The Norton Reader (W. W. Norton). Additionally, the piece will appear in the forthcoming Fifty Great American Short Stories edited by Rion Amalcar Scott. It will be published in January, 2026 by Modern Library (Penguin/Random House). 

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