Kate Tooley is a queer writer originally from the Atlanta area, now based in Flatbush, Brooklyn. They write about the sticky corners of gender and sexuality; complicated families; and the myriad ways in which we become haunted.
They’re currently working on a queer, gothic novel about southern cults, murder, and bodily possession.
Featured Story
The Kenyon Review - “The Golden Apples of Little River Alabama” Spring 2026. Read or listen to audio with sign-up, or purchase the full issue here.
Check out a review of Golden Apples in Short Story Shoutout on Substack where Frank Reilly digs into mythology, structure and language.
Fiction
&
Creative Nonfiction
Stanchion Magazine — “Nobody’s Gonna Make You Go to Pigeon Forge” Issue 24, Fall 2026. Order here.
2025 Lambda Literary, Emerge Anthology - “In 1907 Charles Lester Marlatt assigned roman numerals to the 17-year cicadas but failed to consider the human heart” & “Still Life with Forbidden Fruit” Forthcoming, Summer 2026. Order here.
Gargoyle Magazine — “End Times, or, July Twelfth, Macon Georgia” Issue 14, Online. Forthcoming, Winter 2026
The Kenyon Review — “The Golden Apples of Little River Alabama” Spring 2026 (audio version available in digital issue)
Stanchion Magazine — “A Night at the Zoo” Issue 23 - Spring 2026 (Shortlisted for the 2025 Bridport Flash Fiction Prize; Best Small Fictions nominee.)
Santa Clara Review — “God is a Gardener” Spring 2026
French Quarter Journal — “Little Animals” March, 2025 (Winner of the Tennessee Williams Very Short Fiction Prize)
Tiny Molecules — “The Summer That the Lake Flooded and the Alligator Drowned” Spring 2025 (Best Small Fictions Nominee)
Gigantic Sequins — “You Can't Get to Heaven on the Road to Hell, but 1-95 Will Eventually Get You to Florida” and "How to Close a Box" Fall 2024 (order here)
Passages North — “Elizabeth Bishop Screams on the Beach” and “At the Gallery” January 2024 (Copies available for purchase here.)
Wigleaf- “Uncertain Bodies” January, 2023 (Read their Postcard here.”
Pithead Chapel — “Bait Dog” January, 2023 (Winner of the Larry Brown Short Story Award, guest judge: Kristen Arnett)
Passages North — “Three Times the Ghost of Cousin Sadie Slipped the Veil to Bother Me While I was Reading” November, 2022 (Wigleaf Top 50)
Pigeon Pages — “Controlled Burn” October, 2022 (Best of the Nest 2022 selection)
River Styx — “A Note to All My Future Hinge Dates” June, 2022 (Winner of the 2021 Microfiction Competition)
Gargoyle Magazine — “The End of the World is the Original Femme Fatale” Issue 74, November 2021 (order here)
Retreat West — “Lilith Comes to Me After I Pray for Wholeness” September, 2021 (Runner up, Uncanny Flash Competition)
Listen here.
Santa Fe Writers Project — “Afterimage” May, 2021
Barren Magazine — “The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis” April, 2021
Pidgeonholes - “A Story About Not Going Through the Wardrobe” July, 2020 (Best Microfiction Nom/Wigleaf Top 50 longlist)
Witness Magazine — “Cranky Pants",” “Under the Door,” “The Buzzer” q+1 special issue, June, 2020
X-R-A-Y Literary Magazine — “Memory Palace as Maze” June, 2020
The Inquisitive Eater — “Coq” April, 2020
Longleaf Review — “Natural (Watching Blue Planet II in Bed with My Wife)” March, 2020 (Best American Essays Nominee)
Apocrypha and Abstractions — “Cliff Diving” 2016
Virginia Literary Review — “Magpie” 2013
3.7 Magazine — “Corners” 2012
Glass, Garden — “Like Nor’Easters” 2012
FIFE Zine — “The Angel of St. Michel de Cuxa” 2012
Virginia Literary Review — “Available in Season” 2011
Sanctuary — “Distopia” & “Enter Right, Exit Left” 2010
Other Writing
Building Rhetorics of Joy: An Interview with Bethany Jacobs, 2024
“I Need to Get This Down”: Writing in Paris with Wilbert Turner III, 2023
“Interview With 2019 NBCC Biography Finalist Lucasta Miller” 2020
“Unfamiliar, Like Memory (Alexander Chee, Chloe Caldwell, and my #verygay reading list)” 2019
“How to Make the Most of the Brooklyn Book Festival (and Other “Bookish Events”)” 2019