Kate Dulson

Born in the North, Kate Dulson has clay and coal dust in her veins.  Unremarkable, asthmatic and proudly owned by a dog named Casserole, Kate now lives somewhat mardily in the South with an ever-patient family.     

After fifty foster dogs, five house moves, and twenty-five years of teaching and writing about other people’s books, Kate Dulson left academia for what looked like nice regular college work.  Arriving to see barbed wire fences, the job turned out to be in a Category C prison for men.  That’s when the writing started.  Three years later, the living stories had spilled out onto pages of journals as therapeutic writing and some, quite frankly, terrible poems.  Rather than inflict them on an unsuspecting public, Kate decided to rework the interwoven stories into a novel.  After all who would read a memoir about a claggy working-class prison teacher with early onset bingo-wings?     

It was tempting to focus just on the violent realities of prison life; the burnt-out wings, overdoses, dead rats full of drugs, riots, hostage-taking, commonplace attacks on staff.  But alongside those events, another story formed.  One that didn’t rely on pure sensationalism or exploitation.  One that heard the stories of hope in cells, classrooms, and chicken runs.  One that met the stories and left the rest behind for them to tell.  One that showed what it is to be human when all else is taken away from you.  What remained became Ghosted. 

Part autobiography, part silence, Ghosted follows Kate’s prison education journey from her first lesson to the harshest lessons of all.  It is haunted by the mercurial Dean, who also sees the glimpses of darkness.  His imagined voice and very real glitter fingernails remain long after he has left.  He shows how chance meetings can shape futures in strange ways.  Just like the moment Kate met her future publisher up a mountain half-way around this world ago.