About
Kerry Hanahan is a freelance editor and writer based in Pittsburgh, PA. She has an MFA in creative nonfiction writing from the University of Memphis, where she taught composition. Her creative nonfiction thesis, Gap, won a Ruth H. & Henry Loeb Scharff Scholarship.
She is also an alumna of the University of Pittsburgh, with a degree in english writing, chemistry, and literature. At Pitt, she won a Creative Nonfiction Writing Award, co-founded a writing workshop called The Ink Slingers, and played clarinet in the concert and marching bands while working as a student research assistant at the Graduate School of Public Health.
Hanahan is the former managing editor of The Pinch, an award-winning and internationally distributed literary journal. She assisted in organizing events for the River City Writer’s Series, for which she interviewed authors such as Eric Schlosser, Trevor Corson, and Robert Root.
Hanahan traveled to Montréal in 2010 on a study abroad scholarship to study fiction writing with Padgett Powell and creative nonfiction writing with Chuck Klosterman at the Summer Literary Series. She was a finalist for the 2011 Creative Nonfiction MFA-Off. In 2014, she traveled to the Blue Ridge Mountains in North Carolina to the Wildacres Writing Workshop as a Wildacres Experience Fiction Scholarship winner.
Though voted “Quietest” in her high school class, Hanahan spends hockey season cursing opponents of the Pittsburgh Penguins. Her vices include legal thrillers and Hot Pockets.
Currently, Hanahan is working on a linked short story collection about a young Irish family that is set in the late 1960s during the Troubles in Ireland. She is taking Irish language classes and, yes, she was named after County Kerry. She lives in her hometown of Pittsburgh with a very bad black cat named Cosmic Creepers.
She is also an alumna of the University of Pittsburgh, with a degree in english writing, chemistry, and literature. At Pitt, she won a Creative Nonfiction Writing Award, co-founded a writing workshop called The Ink Slingers, and played clarinet in the concert and marching bands while working as a student research assistant at the Graduate School of Public Health.
Hanahan is the former managing editor of The Pinch, an award-winning and internationally distributed literary journal. She assisted in organizing events for the River City Writer’s Series, for which she interviewed authors such as Eric Schlosser, Trevor Corson, and Robert Root.
Hanahan traveled to Montréal in 2010 on a study abroad scholarship to study fiction writing with Padgett Powell and creative nonfiction writing with Chuck Klosterman at the Summer Literary Series. She was a finalist for the 2011 Creative Nonfiction MFA-Off. In 2014, she traveled to the Blue Ridge Mountains in North Carolina to the Wildacres Writing Workshop as a Wildacres Experience Fiction Scholarship winner.
Though voted “Quietest” in her high school class, Hanahan spends hockey season cursing opponents of the Pittsburgh Penguins. Her vices include legal thrillers and Hot Pockets.
Currently, Hanahan is working on a linked short story collection about a young Irish family that is set in the late 1960s during the Troubles in Ireland. She is taking Irish language classes and, yes, she was named after County Kerry. She lives in her hometown of Pittsburgh with a very bad black cat named Cosmic Creepers.