Kit Carlson started writing at age three, before she could write, dictating stories to her mother. As soon as she could write, the stories and poems kept coming–in high school she wrote a three-volume heroic fantasy novel with her friends providing the workshop setting that kept her going.

This led to a journalism degree, and a brief career in newspapers. But an unhappy layoff set her back on the creative writing track again. She started sending out poems and stories (back in the day before Submittable, when it meant SASEs and long waits for word in the mail), and had three one-act plays produced by the Indian River Players.

But life intervened when she and her husband moved to the DC area, and she began working in corporate communications for a large health care company. She was then editor for Discovery Channel’s print magazine, “Destination Discovery” before leaving to raise her young children. Her ongoing freelance writing career focused on science and nature writing, and she authored three books, The Leopard Son, Bringing Up Baby: Wild Animal Families, and Working Dogs: Tales from the K-9 to 5 World.

Then God intervened, and Kit went to Virginia Theological Seminary to train to be an Episcopal priest, writing long, dense papers that only one person–the professor assigning them—would ever read. Her writing focused on sermons—she was winner of the David H.C. Read Preaching Prize—and she almost forgot her early days as a writer.

In summer of 2018, she spent a week at the Kenyon Writers Workshop, studying with poet Afaa M. Weaver, and the long suppressed desire to write, to tell stories, to shape words into vehicles of delight and awareness, returned. Kit is a Pushcart Prize nominee, and also author of the recent Speaking Our Faith: Equipping the Next Generations to Speak their Faith Aloud (Church Publishing, 2018). Today, she lives in East Lansing, Michigan, where she is rector of All Saints Episcopal Church, with her husband Wendell, and Lola, a nervous rescue dog.