​Kathleen Finneran

Senior ​Writer in Residence
research interests:
Non-fiction Writing
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  • Washington University
    CB 1122
    One Brookings Dr.
    St. Louis, MO 63130-4899

​Kathleen Finneran's writing and teaching focus on creative nonfiction. She is the recipient of the Missouri Arts Council Writers' Biennial Prize, a Whiting Writers' Award, and a Guggenheim Fellowship.

Kathleen Finneran is the author of the memoir The Tender Land: A Family Love Story (Houghton Mifflin, 2000; Mariner Paperbacks, 2003). Her essays have been published in various anthologies, including The Place That Holds Our History(Southwest Missouri State University Press, 1990), Seeking St. Louis: Voices from a River City (Missouri Historical Society Press, 2000), and The "M" Word: Writers on Same-Sex Marriage (Algonquin, 2004). She is the recipient of the Missouri Arts Council Writers' Biennial Prize, a Whiting Writers' Award, and a Guggenheim Fellowship

    The Tender Land: A Family Love Story

    By ​Kathleen Finneran

    A superb portrait of family life, THE TENDER LAND is a love story unlike any other. The Finnerans -- parents and five children, Irish Catholics in St. Louis -- are a seemingly unexceptional family. Theirs is a story seldom told, yet it makes manifest how rich and truly extraordinary the ordinary daily experience we take for granted is. In quietly luminous language, Kathleen Finneran renders the emotional, spiritual, and physical terrain of family life -- its closeness and disconnection, its intimacy and estrangement--and pays tribute to the love between parents and children, brothers and sisters.