S. Kirk Walsh is a novelist, editor, and teacher based in Austin, Texas. Her debut novel,The Elephant of Belfast, inspired by true events that took place in Belfast, Northern Ireland, during World War II, will be published by Counterpoint Press. The novel will be published as The Zookeeper of Belfast by Hodder/Hachette (the UK, the Commonwealth, and Ireland) in April and September of 2021. Walsh is now working on second novel inspired by events that took place in Detroit during the 1930s and 1940s.
Over the years, her fiction, essays, and book reviews has been published in the New York Times Book Review, the Virginia Quarterly Review, Story Quarterly, Guernica, Longreads, Virginia Quarterly Review, San Francisco Chronicle, Los Angeles Review of Books, among others. She has been a resident at Ucross, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Ragdale, and Yaddo. Each September, she leads a nine-month workshop for fiction writers working on novels and story collections (application is required & space is limited).
Prior to moving to Austin, Texas, Walsh worked on a number of editorial staffs of different national magazines, including Rolling Stone, The New Yorker, Self, and Entertainment Weekly. She also worked as a marketing writer for Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts. In the city, she attended the creative writing program at New York University, where she studied with E. L. Doctorow, Peter Carey, and Mona Simpson. More recently, Walsh has served as a screener for MFA program at the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas.
Walsh offers a range of editing services for nonfiction and fiction projects—from ghostwriting to editorial letters. Her clients have been published with HarperCollins, Ecco, University of Texas Press, LSU Press, among others. She is the founder of Austin Bat Cave, a writing & tutoring center for kids. American Short Fiction awarded her an honor of extraordinary service in the literary community in 2018.
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