Kathleen E. George - Professor

Kathleen George is a theatre director, a teacher of playwriting and dramatic literature courses, and a fiction writer. She has directed for the university mainstage and for the Three Rivers Shakespeare Festival. She holds an MA and a PhD in theatre and an MFA in creative writing. Productions she has directed include The Rehearsal, The Country Wife, She Stoops to Conquer, The Winter’s Tale, Hamlet, Much Ado About Nothing, King Lear, A Flea in Her Ear, and Our Town. A number of these productions were listed among Pittsburgh Post-Gazette’s ten best of the year; Much Ado was a finalist for the American College Theatre Festival. She has also produced and sometimes directed over 50 original plays written by students.

George has been the recipient of grants from the University of Pittsburgh and from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. She has been granted fellowships at artists' colonies, among which are the VCCA and MacDowell.

Her theatre publications are: Rhythm in Drama (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1980), Playwriting: The First Workshop (Butterworth, 1994), and Winter’s Tales: Reflections on the Novelistic Stage (University of Delaware Press, 2005). Her short fiction has appeared in, among other journals, Mademoiselle, Cimarron Review, The North American Review, New Letters, and Alaska Quarterly Review. She has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and one story was listed among the distinguished in Best American Short Stories. Major fiction publications are: The Man in the Buick, a collection of stories (BKMK press, 1999), and Taken, a novel, (Delacorte, 2001). Taken has been translated into French, German, Japanese, Dutch, Danish, and Norwegian. Next came the novels Fallen, 2004, Afterimage, 2007, The Odds (a finalist for the Edgar award), 2009, Hideout in 2011, and Simple in 2012.  She is working on another novel and also a book about plotting using theatre exercises.

She has taught for Pitt in London and has served as faculty and as Academic Dean for Pitt’s Semester at Sea program.