Katherine Center


Katherine Sherar Pannill Center is a contemporary American fiction author.

Early life and education

Center graduated from St. John's School in Houston, Texas, and from Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York. She won the Vassar College Fiction Prize while a student. She received her M.A. in fiction from the University of Houston, where she was the co-editor of the literary fiction magazine, Gulf Coast. Her graduate thesis, Peepshow, a collection of stories, was a finalist for the Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction. Her sister is U.S. Congresswoman Lizzie Pannill Fletcher

Career

Center is the author of several books, which she describes as "bittersweet comic novels." Her first novel, The Bright Side of Disaster, was optioned by Varsity Pictures, and her sixth, How to Walk Away, was a New York Times bestseller and Book of the Month Club pick for May, 2018, and a Target Book Club pick for July, 2019. Center's 2019 novel, Things You Save in a Fire was New York Times bestseller, and a Book of the Month Club pick for July, 2019.
Along with Jeffrey Toobin and Douglas Brinkley, Center was one of the speakers at the 2007 Houston Chronicle Book and Author Dinner.
Center has published essays in Real Simple and the anthologies Because I Love Her, CRUSH: 26 Real-Life Tales of First Love, and My Parents Were Awesome.
Center also makes video essays, one of which, a letter to her daughter about motherhood, became the very popular Defining a Movement video for the Mom 2.0 conference. Center was a presented at the 2018 TEDx Bend, and her talk was entitled, "We Need to Teach Boys to Read Stories About Girls".

Books