Chelsea Catherine is an American author and essayist best known for her novel Summer of the Cicadas. She is a nonbinary lesbian living all over the country.
Chelsea has been writing since the age of eight. After graduating from the University of Tampa with their MFA in creative writing, Chelsea Catherine moved to the Florida Keys where they wrote their first book and began studying nonfiction.
Summer of the Cicadas (2018) is a dark, slim novel that contains many deep reflections on depression, desire, and addiction from the perspective of a gay woman trying to move forward in her life.
Her debut book received several awards and good publicity. The author of The Perfect Liar, Thomas Christopher Greene wrote, "Chelsea Catherine is a bright, raw, original new voice in American fiction."
In 2018, they won the Mary C Mohr award for nonfiction through the Southern Indiana Review, and their novel, Summer of the Cicadas, won the Quill Prose Award from Red Hen Press. Most recently, they won an Emerging Artist’s Award from Creative Pinellas.
Her nonfiction stories have been featured in such publications as The Florida Review, The Coachella Review, Crab Fat Magazine, and others.
"My goal with writing nonfiction is to gain insight into my life. I’ll write a scene in the heat of the moment to preserve the feeling but then go back later to insert the insight or lesson I was incapable of understanding in real-time. Nonfiction helps me assign meaning to my experiences, especially the darker ones," says Chelsea.
They were judges for the Vocal Media Challenge and the Red Hen Press 2022 Creative Nonfiction Award.
In the summer of 2022, they announced on their blog that they had moved to Massachusetts.
Photo credit: chelseacatherinewriter.com
