S. K. Kruse

S. K. Kruse was born and raised in Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin, where she attended Catholic school for twelve years. In 1988, she left for the big city to earn a degree in English from UW-Madison and launch her writing career. After a stunning debut in The Onion, however, she found herself on a twenty-five-year sabbatical to raise eleven children. Since emerging from this truth-is-stranger-than-fiction period of her life, her writing has been longlisted for the John Steinbeck Award for Fiction and has won multiple awards in the National League of American Pen Women’s “Soul-making Keats Literary Competition.” Her writing has appeared in Reed Magazine, and, in October of 2021, Deuxmers Publishing released a collection of her short stories, Tales from the Liminal.

Works that have had a significant influence on her life, thought, and writing in approximate chronological order include Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes, Kafka’s Metamorphosis, Orwell’s Animal Farm and 1984, Golding’s Lord of the Flies, Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, Thomas A Kempis’s The Imitation of Christ, the New Jerusalem Bible, Eliot’s The Waste Land, Hugo’s Les Misérables, Bonhoeffer’s The Cost of Discipleship, Teilhard de Chardin’s The Phenomenon of Man, Moore’s Dark Nights of the Soul, Tolle’s The Power of Now, Nietzsche’s Parable of the Madman, The Birth of Tragedy, and Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Dostoevsky’s Crime & Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov, Sartre’s No Exit, Hesse’s Steppenwolf and Demian, Feuerbach’s The Essence of Christianity, Buber’s I and Thou, Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus, Wright’s The Moral Animal, Tillich’s Dynamics of Faith and The Courage to Be, Carroll’s The Existential Jesus, Ricoeur’s The Symbolism of Evil, Emerson’s Self-Reliance, Underhill’s Mysticism, and Trungpa’s The Myth of Freedom.