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.
“There are no small emotions in “The Golden Apples of Little River, Alabama.” There is lust and longing. There is fear and loathing. There are long-held grudges and matrilineal machinations. And while fever pitched, all of it is fun and often very funny.”
— Read the rest of the review in Short Story Shoutout.
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