About Kip
Photo by Steve Horn
Kip Robinson Greenthal has dedicated her career to the written word, storytelling, and literary endeavors. She holds a B.A. in English Literature and Creative Writing from Sarah Lawrence College, where she studied with Grace Paley. For eighteen years, she worked as a librarian in schools and public libraries. In 1993, she became the Education Director for Seattle Arts & Lectures, and founded and directed the Writers in the Schools program (WITS). Believing literacy empowers a person’s life, Kip collaborated with a vast number of authors—Tim O’Brien, Frank McCourt, and Marilynne Robinson among them— to work with teachers and students in the classroom. Under her guidance, WITS received the prestigious Golden Apple Award, which honors education, programs and schools in making a difference in Washington state education.
Throughout her working years, Kip always wrote, studying with numerous authors, including Brenda Peterson, Rebecca Brown, James Welch, and Jane Hamilton. She was selected for the Jack Straw Writers Program, and awarded a Hedgebrook residency. Her short story, "Tattoo Emporium," was published in Secret Histories: Stories of Courage, Risk, and Revelation, edited by Brenda Peterson, Laura Foreman, and Meredith Bailey in 2013, and has appeared in Currents, an anthology published by the Lopez Writers Guild in 2004. In January 2007, Washington state Poet Laureate Elizabeth Austen selected her short story, “Stealing,” to air on KUOW’s On the Beat.
Her first novel, Shoal Water, won the Landmark Prize for Fiction sponsored by Homebound Publications, and was published in October 2021. Homebound Publications nominated Shoal Water for the Pushcart Prize, and in May, 2022, Shoal Water received a silver medal from the Nautilus Book Awards. The story takes place in Nova Scotia, where Kip lived for twelve years.