Katharine Haake, The Heaviness of Ghosts (Pre-Order)

The Heaviness of Ghosts
Essays
Winner of the 2022 Wolfson Press Prose Award
by Katharine Haake
Foreword by Kelcey Ervick
paperback, 186 pages
2026

Cover art by Lisa Bloomfield.

A new title in our American Storytellers series

This collection of personal essays constitutes a memoir that is both intimate and haunting. Haake looks back on her alienated childhood, her failed marriage, and her insecurities as a mother, all the while exploring the mystery of her inability to achieve a sustainable sense of self. In the process, she discovers the surprising extent to which the people around her, the people she has met, are also lost, have also been searching. Because Haake’s courageous self-questioning takes her beneath the details of her life’s disappointments, she exposes us to our own most secret selves, making us ask whether we have been honest with ourselves. Are we alone? In The Heaviness of Ghosts, you may find the reliable confidante you’ve been looking for.

About the Author

Katharine Haake is a fourth-generation Californian whose work reflects a deep engagement with the land, the people, and the history of the place. Her recent eco fable, What Happened Was (2024) inaugurated a new climate change fiction series from 11:11 Press, Nothing Exists Alone. Her forthcoming memoir-in-essays, The Heaviness of Ghosts, is the recipient of the Wolfson Prose Prize. 

Her other books include an eco-dystopian science fiction fable, The Time of Quarantine; a hybrid California prose lyric, That Water, Those Rocks; and three collections of stories. She was also lead editor on a 2021 anthology, What Falls Away Is Always: Writers Over 60 on Writing and Death. Haake’s writing has appeared widely in literary journals and been recognized as distinguished by Best American Short Stories and Best American Essays, among others. A collaborative text/image piece she did with artist Lisa Bloomfield is included in Bloomfield’s portfolio in the permanent collection of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

Haake is a prominent figure in the field of Creative Writing Studies, long-time contributor to its scholarship and pedagogy, and the author of the foundational What Our Speech Disrupts: Feminism and Creative Writing Studies.

She is a professor emerita at California State University, Northridge, and lives in Los Angeles.