Just don’t ask how I got the name
Kit-Bacon Gressitt was spawned by a Southern Baptist creationist and a liberal social worker in the northern most southern state, Maryland, hence K-B’s fondness for grits, spoonbread, and steamed blue crabs with Old Bay.
Having inherited the requisite sense of humor to survive family dinner-table debates and the imagination to avoid them, she subsequently headed to California, where she’s had several professional lives—including that of Sunday columnist at a libertarian daily. There, she received writerly awards and death threats from neo-Nazis and fundamentalists. The sales team loved her.
The last job K-B had that required adult attire, concluded with her flipping the bird to the corporate patriarchy and going back to school.
After earning an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of California Riverside, and traveling from Western Kentucky to Cuba to research her narrative-nonfiction thesis, she now teaches Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at California State University San Marcos, while contemplating revolution.
To that end, K-B has a penchant for political protest; she’s the publisher and a founding editor of the intersectional feminist literary journal Writers Resist, and she delights in fomenting progressive change in any way that won't land her in the hoosegow.
She also teaches writing workshops of various flavors, hosts the Writers Read author series at Fallbrook Library, in San Diego County, and organizes the annual Fallbrook Writers Conference, which is free—they’re all about accessibility.
Mother and Father frolicking
K-B’s narrative nonfiction, commentary, and political fiction address feminism, power and oppression, social justice, and the climate crisis. These works, and K-B’s book reviews and author features, have been published in Hard Crackers, Evening Street Review and Evening Street Press (Spring 2019), Not My President: The Anthology of Dissent (Thoughtcrime Press, December 2017), Ducts, Publishers Weekly, The Missing Slate, Trivia: Feminist Voices, Ms. Magazine, the former Gay San Diego and North County Times, San Diego Union Tribune, and others.
Pigeon the cat considering coffee
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A postscript from K-B:
As a diehard fan of reproductive justice, I know politics and dogma don't belong between my legs or anyone else's. Abortion must be safe, legal and accessible. However, in those states where the patriarchy prevails, there are options:
Visit Plan C, a guide to safe, in-home medication abortion and how to order abortion pills or
Visit Abortion on Demand for physician-supported medication abortion care online (not available in all U.S. states) or
There are always folks who know how to put a bit of sterile tubing, some suction, and a mayonnaise jar to good use.
And why not ask about my name? Because I haven’t yet come up with a good story for it, but it is Mother’s doing.