NEWS: updates for Summer 2021

My short story “Monarch” is now live in Streetlight Magazine!

My micro fiction “Wanderer’s Joy” placed second in the Eastern Shore Writers Association’s annual “Crossroads” competition

My short story “Tejedora” was a finalist for the Marguerite McGlinn Fiction Prize, awarded by Philadelphia Stories

About Me:

Kris Faatz (rhymes with skates) is a fiction writer and musician. Her first novel, To Love A Stranger, was a finalist for the 2016 Schaffner Press Music in Literature Award and was released May 2017 by Blue Moon Publishers (Toronto, ON). Her second novel, literary fantasy Fourteen Stones, is forthcoming in 2022 from The Patchwork Raven (Wellington, NZ).

Kris’s short fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in journals including The Baltimore Review, CRAFT, Kenyon Review Online, Streetlight Magazine, Potomac Review, and Reed, and has received recognition in various competitions, most recently winning Tiferet Journal‘s 2020 fiction contest. She has been a contributor at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference and the recipient of a Peter Taylor Fellowship at the Kenyon Review Writers Workshops. In 2018, she served as a preliminary-round judge for the Flannery O’Connor Short Fiction Award. She currently teaches creative writing with the Community College of Baltimore County, Baltimore County Public Library system, Baltimore Bridges, and Writopia Lab DC,  and is a regular presenter at the Bay to Ocean Writers Conference, run by Maryland’s Eastern Shore Writers Association. She is also a performing pianist.

As a no-holds-barred reader, Kris has special devotion to Barbara Kingsolver, Terry Pratchett, Richard Adams, F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Steinbeck, Christopher Moore, and Neil Gaiman. She loves hiking and exploring the outdoors, especially if it involves lakes, oceans or streams. She lives in Maryland with her husband, jazz saxophonist and composer Paul Faatz, and feline contingent Alafair, Templeton, and Fergus.

BOOKS:

Find To Love A Stranger in paperback and e-book formats on Amazon, and in paperback at Barnes and Noble.

Connect with me (and leave a review) on Goodreads!

Praise for Kris’s debut novel:

“To Love A Stranger is a page-turner, a story that will resonate with the reader for a long time to come.” – Geeta Kothari, author of I Brake For Moose and Other Stories

“Faatz takes her reader into the music in a way that feels genuine and serious, yet never overly technical. Her sentences make me want to listen to Chopin’s third Ballade, to Brahms’ Hungarian Dances.” – Hannah Howard, author of Feast

“To Love A Stranger was written with the harmony of humanity in mind. To Love A Stranger is a song.” – Leesa Cross-Smith, author of Whiskey & Ribbons

“It’s the kind of book people don’t write enough anymore, one where you’re just with the people, and there’s nothing to get in between you and them.” – Tom Andes, author