Editor's Bio

Editor's Bio

Kathy Rhodes is a board member of the Tennessee Writers Alliance and President of the Williamson County [Tennessee] Council for the Written Word, an organization which encourages, educates, and empowers writers. She also serves as the facilitator for a monthly Writers Reading Night at Barnes & Noble, Brentwood, Tennessee.

Her blog, geared to writing and writers, is http://kathyrhodes.wordpress.com.

Rhodes studied creative nonfiction under Lee Gutkind at a "5 R's of Creative Nonfiction" workshop in 2007, and she studied under Lee Gutkind and Dinty W. Moore at the 2008 Mid-South Creative Nonfiction Conference in Oxford, Mississippi. She has also attended the Lost State Writers Conference and the Columbus [Ohio] Writers Conference.

A Southern writer, Rhodes is the author of Pink Butterbeans: Stories from the Heart of a Southern Woman, a collection of 50 personal essays. She is founder and editor of the online magazine, Muscadine Lines: A Southern Journal, (www.asouthernjournal.com), ISSN 1554-8449. The journal, in its third year, is a Place for Emerging and Established Writers to Publish Their Works. She is also editor of the book Muscadine Lines: A Southern Anthology, a collection of 28 stories and 28 poems by 28 writers, all veterans of the journal by the same name.

Rhodes signed her works at the Southern Festival of Books in 2005, 2006, and 2007; the Mississippi Delta Literary Festival in 2006; and the Southern Kentucky Book Fest in April, 2007.

Stories written by Rhodes have appeared in magazines, newspapers, and literary anthologies, including the local Our Voices: Williamson County Literary Review, 1995, 1997, and 1998. Her essay, “The Wedding Hankie,” was included in Simon & Schuster’s nationally distributed Chocolate for a Woman’s Soul II. She has also written for regional publications, such as The Oxford So and So and The Writer's Loft's The Trunk, and online publications, such as USA Deep South and Southern Hum.

Born and raised during the 1950s and 60s in the Mississippi Delta, "the most southern place on earth," Rhodes writes personal essays that reflect her Deep South roots—warm observations and reminiscences about family, place, and southern life, laced with nostalgia and/or humor.

She earned a BA in English from Delta State University and did post-graduate studies in technical writing and editing at the University of Memphis. After teaching for a decade, Rhodes applied her skills in a business setting, where her responsibilities included research, layout, and editing proposals and reports; developing marketing materials, brochures, and newsletters; web design; and bookkeeping. In 2006 Rhodes established her own business, CHECKPOINT Proofreading & Editorial Services.

Currently, she resides in Franklin, Tennessee, with her entrepreneur husband and pampered cocker spaniel.