Kim Church‘s debut novel Byrd won the Crook’s Corner Book Prize and the IPPY Bronze Award for literary fiction, was a Chautauqua Prize finalist, and was long-listed for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize and the SIBA Book Award. Her second novel, Lena and Rae, will be published in 2027.
Her short work appears in The Sun Magazine, The Great Books Foundation Short Story Omnibus, Believer Logger, Cold Mountain Review, Huffington Post, INCH Magazine, The Chicago Tribune, Shenandoah (Pushcart Prize nominee), Painted Bride Quarterly, Mississippi Review, Prime Number Magazine, North Carolina Literary Review, W.W. Norton’s Flash Fiction Forward, and elsewhere. She has received fiction fellowships from the North Carolina Arts Council and residencies at the Millay Colony, Vermont Studio Center, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and Weymouth Center for the Arts and Humanities. She has taught creative writing in diverse settings, from conferences to classrooms to homeless shelters to death row.
Born and raised in Lexington, North Carolina, Kim earned her B.A. in English from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and her J.D. from UNC School of Law. She worked for many years as a civil trial and appellate attorney, advocating for plaintiffs in civil rights, sexual abuse, fraud, malpractice, and product liability cases. She taught and wrote in her field of practice.
She lives in Raleigh with her husband, artist Anthony Ulinski.
Watch A Day with Kim Church, a short author documentary by Anna Schwartz.
Read the interview Coffee break: Kim Church on Byrd.
Additional interviews and articles are online in Fiction Writers Review, The Nervous Breakdown, Bloom, Washington Independent Review of Books, and elsewhere.
Photo by Anthony Ulinski