“Katie Haegele’s writing is a miracle.”
Hi there. I’m a writer and editor who lives in Philadelphia. I write about grief, love, books, cats, material culture, queer stuff, and the chance meetings and small domestic details that make up my life. That’s the short description. Here’s a longer one:
I earned a bachelor’s degree in linguistics from the University of Pennsylvania, and after I graduated I started working in arts journalism. I got a job writing for the Philadelphia Weekly, where my column The Dubliner, a chronicle of a year I spent living in Ireland, was recognized for excellence in column writing by the Association of Alternative Newsmedia. For several years after that I was a regular contributor to the Philadelphia Inquirer, mainly as a book critic but also as a reporter. In a column for that paper I looked at interactive novels, computer-generated poetry, and other places where traditional storytelling and new technologies intersect.
Tickled to be holding a giant library card at the Portland Zine Symposium
Since that time I have published personal and critical essays in many publications, including the Utne Reader, Adbusters, Philadelphia Magazine, Rain Taxi, Library Journal, and The Millions. I’ve reported on antiharrassment activism for Bitch magazine, interviewed artists about their work for The Comics Journal and The Believer Logger, and for an article for Men’s Health I looked at new research being done on non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. This rare piece of long-form reporting was important to me because NHL was the illness my father had died from a few years earlier, and because the men I spoke to were so vulnerable and giving in their interviews with me.
I write poetry sometimes too. Richard Hansen published my poem “Kaiho” as a beautiful, tiny Poems-for-All book. In 2023, pages of my blackout poetry series, Softening is an invitation just to look, was featured in a solo show at DobraVaga Gallery in Ljubljana, Slovenia. You can see some of those poems here.
I’m also a longtime zine maker and a great believer in the power of this kind of self-publishing. I found the punk community back in 2004 after I made my first zine, a collection of poems called Word Math, and brought it to the Philly Zine Fest. I met people there who were interested in my work, and equally interested in sharing theirs with me; a true connection was made, and for the first time I felt that my solitary pursuits might have led me to a place of belonging. Through my involvement with zines I eventually met the good people at Microcosm Publishing, who have now published four of my books: a memoir called White Elephants; a collection of essays called Slip of the Tongue; Cats I’ve Known, an illustrated collection of stories about cats; and my most recent book, a guide to natural living for the spiritually inclined called The Kitchen Witch, which I co-wrote with my magical friend Nadine Schneider.
I also have work in the anthology Fanzines (Thames & Hudson, 2010), The Alternative Media Handbook (Routledge, 2007), and My Red Couch (Wipf and Stock, 2010), which was concerned with the authors’ struggles to reconcile spirituality with feminism. For that one I wrote about making found poetry, which I consider a way of listening to, and answering, the universe.
I used to have a horror of public speaking but I kept on doing it anyway and now I sometimes even enjoy it! I’m proud to have given readings or talks at Ladyfest Philly, the Portland Book Festival, the Radar Reading Series in San Francisco, the NY Art Book Fair at MoMA PS1, the public radio station WXPN, and a great many DIY spaces.
These days I mostly spend my time doing Consonant Collective things with Joseph Carlough, my partner in life and other creative projects.
