Beth Kephart, the award-winning author of some 40 books of fiction and nonfiction, has chaired national literature juries and has written about memoir and literature for The New York Times, The Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Millions, Literary Hub, Creative Nonfiction, Brevity, Huffington Post, Image Journal, and elsewhere. Her essays can be found at the Boston Globe, Orion, The Normal School, Ninth Letter, North American Review, Creative Nonfiction, Cleaver, Brevity, Chicago Tribune, The New York Times, Oldster Magazine, and elsewhere.
In 2025, Beth received a series of honors, including winning the Porch Prize for Creative Nonfiction for the extended essay “Conversations with Women in Blue,” finalist commendation from the Pattis Family Foundation Creative Arts Book Award (for My Life in Paper: Adventures in Ephemera), a Silver Medal for Historical Fiction from the North American Book Awards (for Tomorrow Will Bring Sunday’s News: A Philadelphia Story), and finalist honors for “Lightning Strikes” from the Cleaver Magazine Visual Poetics contest.
Beth is the recipient of the 2015 Beltran Family Award for Innovative Teaching and Mentoring at the University of Pennsylvania. She was the 2013 Miami YoungArts Master Teacher. She has conducted workshops across the country, participated on many big-festival panels, given numerous keynotes, taught online and in person through Juncture, CraftTalks, Cleaver, and elsewhere, and interviewed some of the most important writers of our time on live stages. She was named one of the 50 writers celebrated in the year-long Philadelphia’s Literary Legacy exhibit at the Philadelphia International Airport. Beth’s thoughts about writing and teaching memoir are featured in this July 2022 Publishers Weekly story. Her book, We Are the Words, as well as her memoir expertise is featured in Issue 49 of Breathe Magazine.
Beth’s novels for younger readers include Cloud Hopper, The Great Upending, Wild Blues, This Is the Story of You, Going Over, and Undercover. She has authored a series of picture books including Trini’s Big Leap (illustrated by William Sulit), And I Paint It: Henriette Wyeth’s World (illustrated by Amy June Bates), Beautiful Useful Things: What William Morris Made (illustrated by Melodie Stacey), A Room of Your Own: A Story Inspired by Virginia Woolf’s Famous Essay (illustrated by Julia Breckenreid), and Good Books for Bad Children: The Genius of Ursula Nordstrom (illustrated by Chloe Bristol). She has authored novels as well as biographies for children for Core Knowledge and collaborated with the illustrators Roberto Innocenti and Olga Dugina on Mud Angels and The Land of Faraway, for Creative Editions.
Beth is a paper artist whose work has been featured in numerous literary magazines, What Women Create, and Print Magazine online, among other places. She sells her work through an Etsy shop, at farmers’ markets, and at guild shows. More about her paper story can be found at Bind Arts.
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