please do not go to a website listed as katebernheimer [dot] com which has been taken over by robots pretending to be Kate and trying to charge her thousands of dollars to get the domain back
Kate Bernheimer is a distinguished author, scholar, and editor celebrated for her groundbreaking contributions to fairy tales. As a writer of fiction, she has published two story collections, including How a Mother Weaned Her Girl from Fairy Tales, and three early experimental novels. She also is a vanguard editor of new fairy tales and essays about fairy tales, including as editor of the World Fantasy Award winning and bestselling My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me: Forty New Fairy Tales and xo Orpheus: Fifty New Myths, and as editor of Fairy Tale Review, an award winning literary magazine whose selections have appeared in The O Henry Awards anthology and Best American Short Stories. Her newest short stories have appeared in Ploughshares, The Iowa Review, American Short Fiction, The Adroit Journal, The Hopkins Review, and elsewhere. With Laird Hunt, she was a finalist for the Shirley Jackson Award for the co-authored novella Office at Night, a joint commission of Coffee House Press and The Walker Art Center. She is also author of author of three children's books published by Penguin Random House. Her books have been translated into Catalan, Chinese, Greek, French, Korean, Italian, Spanish, Turkish, and other languages. Her nonfiction about fairy tales has been featured such places as The Los Angeles Times, The New Yorker (Page-Turner blog), The New York Times Book Review, and NPR's "All Things Considered." Bernheimer has been a frequent featured speaker at museums, conferences, and literary festivals where she shares her theories on the ethics and aesthetics of fairy tales from antiquity to the present. She relishes, especially, her architectural collaborations with her brother, Andrew Bernheimer of Bernheimer Architecture, featured in a long-running series in Places Journal and a recent book of the same title, Fairy Tale Architecture, as well as an exhibition -- now traveling to architecture museums nationwide -- commissioned by The Center for Architecture in NYC in 2022. To quote bestselling author Benjamin Percy, writing for The New York Times, "Anyone attracted to fairy tales and fables should check out the stories and criticism of Kate Bernheimer." She grew up in Massachusetts and is Professor of English at the University of Arizona, where she teaches a popular large-lecture fairy tale course and fiction workshops.
Selected News and Work
THE LION’S DEN (a novel) is forthcoming! The glorious Publisher’s Marketplace announcement was made on March 7, 2025 and reads, “Fairy tale expert Kate Bernheimer's THE LION'S DEN, a portrait of two dance-obsessed teenage girls navigating the very real ogres masquerading as responsible adults in their Massachusetts public high school in the 1980s, pitched for fans of THE REHEARSAL and SKIPPY DIES, to Liese Mayer at Little, Brown, at auction, by Kate Garrick at Salky Literary Management (world).”
Fairy Tale Architecture is an ongoing series co-curated with Andrew Bernheimer of Bernheimer Architecture. Watch for 2025’s forthcoming installment.
“The Punk’s Bride” is one of Kate’s oft-taught very short stories, and was written for The Master’s Review and based on a favorite Grimm fairy tale, “The Hare Bride.” Kate later expanded “The Punk’s Bride” and published the longer version in Notre Dame Review alongside an interview on fairy tales.
An essay that draws from a series of lectures Kate has offered on Anne Frank and Amy Winehouse appeared in Orion Magazine, “I’ll Show Them That Anne Frank Wasn’t Born Yesterday!” (the title is quotation from The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank). Worth the click alone is the beautiful illustration of Anne Frank by Edward Carey which accompanies the essay.
“This Rapturous Form” is an early essay on fairy tales, adapted from a lecture originally offered at the Gramercy Theater for the Museum of Modern Art in conjunction with the beautiful show “Kiki Smith: Prints, Books, Things.” Kiki Smith, who showed a short film at the event, arrived dressed as Little Red Riding Hood wielding a basket filled with pamphlets she had created especially for the event. The essay was published in the peer-review journal Marvels & Tales, a vanguard in the field.