About S. K. Kruse

S. K. Kruse is a fiction writer and Co-Curator of The Liminality Project. Her work explores the “betwixt-and-between” of human experience—the thresholds where one way of being has fallen away and what comes next has not yet fully emerged. She explores this terrain through short fiction, essays on The Liminal Hub, and through telography, a word she coined for “the story of a soul,” or an “account of one’s becoming.” On the page and beyond, her work keeps returning to this strange and fertile middle ground.

Her debut collection, Tales From the Liminal (Deuxmers, 2021), contains fifteen short stories set within these threshold spaces. A Study Edition for classroom use followed in 2025. Her fiction has been longlisted for the John Steinbeck Award for Fiction, and her next book, Of Beginnings and Ends (Deuxmers, 2026), is a Soul-Making Keats Literary Award-winning telography.

At The Liminality Project, Kruse serves alongside the founding curator Dr. Timothy Carson, who teaches courses on liminality in the Honors College at the University of Missouri. She is also a member of the Guild for Engaged Liminality, which co-sponsors the annual Liminal Essay Contest that Kruse founded for high school and college students to explore and write from the thresholds of their own lives. The fifth annual contest opens January 1, 2027.

For those who want to explore the story of their own becoming, Kruse created Tell the Story of Your Soul, a self-paced online or print course, with accompanying facilitator materials.

She also writes Libations from the Liminal, a newsletter from the borderlands, where she pours out philosophy, spirituality, and the arts as offerings to the mysteries of existence.

Background

A UW–Madison alumna and Wisconsin native, Kruse lives with her husband in the rolling hills of the Driftless region, where they raised eleven children. Her writing has been shaped by writers and thinkers ranging from Bradbury and Kafka to Tillich and Camus.

Speaking & Workshops

Kruse welcomes invitations for discussions, presentations, workshops, retreats, and classroom visits exploring creativity, storytelling, and liminality through her fiction titles, as well as Tell the Story of Your Soul, The Art of the Liminal, and Betwixt & Between: Discovering the Gift of the Liminal.

If you would like to know more…

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.