Getting to know Kathryn Trueblood

Kathryn Trueblood is a faculty member in the English department at Western Washington University.

In this video, she talks about her award-winning story "No-Tell Hotel," her work with the student-produced Jeopardy magazine and her love for the department in which she works.

An associate professor of English, Trueblood won the 2013 Bellevue Literary Review Goldenberg Prize for Fiction for her story “The No-Tell Hotel.”

The contest was judged by Pulitzer Prize winning author Jane Smiley.

The Bellevue Literary Review is a literary magazine published twice a year by the Department of Medicine at New York University Langone Medical Center. According to the publication’s website, topics examine human existence through the prism of health and healing, illness and disease, including poetry, short stories and essays.

“The No-Tell Hotel” follows a mother who has opened her door to her son’s friends who have run away or been kicked out of their homes after high school graduation. One of these teenagers in particular, Sid, has a mother with multiple sclerosis who the narrator must care for after Sid runs away.

Trueblood herself was hospitalized and diagnosed with an autoimmune disease in 2007.

“The experience of illness has affected my work profoundly,” Trueblood said. “Many of the stories in the collection I'm writing now, ‘The Medicated Marriage,’ are about children and parents finding love in the imperfect. There’s very little in our society that recognizes living well with pain or illness. This award has made me so happy, beyond words."

Trueblood’s book, “The Baby Lottery,” was a Book Sense Pick in 2007 and more recently, she won the 2011 Red Hen Press Short Story Award. She has been published in The Los Angeles Review, The Seattle Weekly, Poets and Writers Magazine and many other publications. She has taught at Western since 1991.