kate-stout.com

Cover art by Vicki Johnson

“Ambient Light,” published by Saltcoats Press, is available on Amazon in hardbound, paperback and ebook. Visit: ambientlightnovel.com for reviews and a really fun Playlist of songs from the novel.

Friendships have a funny way of getting under your skin. In AMBIENT LIGHT seven friends navigate the tricky teenaged years by clinging to each other. But when Sebastian, the center of their universe, splits off from their pack of friends to live an openly gay life in San Francisco, he leaves his friends perplexed and floundering. The youthful magnetism he possessed infests his friends—Adie, Breck, Mary Clay, Tony, Jude and Grady—with his love of music, poetry, social engagement but, most of all, his passion for wild and crazy living.  But just as their love for him continues to glow through the years, so does the undercurrent of resentment engendered by his abandonment of them. The six survivors carry Sebastian in their hearts like a talisman but with the caveat that inevitably they each must deal with the shackles of his influence, too.

Author, Playwright, Publisher, Journalist, Editor, Educator

So many sentences absolutely struck with an axe out of crystal.

Virginia Woolf

Career Highlights

• April 2022-on. Founding Board of Directors, The Concord Bridge, a weekly non-profit newspaper distributed free to all homes and businesses in Concord, MA. Launched October 22, 2022

• Editorial Assistant, The Letters of Virginia Woolf, Vol 6, working with Nigel Nicolson

• Number 21, commissioned by the Don Quixote Experimental Children’s Theatre and performed at the Brooklyn Academy of Music

• Editor and publisher, Nantucket Map & Legend, an arts and issues newspaper

• Plays produced in New York, Nantucket & Chicago; artistic director, Theatre Workshop of Nantucket

• Instructor in British and American fiction at Harvard University’s Institute for Learning in Retirement

• Award-winning journalist, Sigma Delta Chi for best magazine reporting: “Teenage Suicide,” Louisville Today Magazine

• Articles in the following magazines: The Saturday Review (cover story), Ms Magazine, Bride, McCall’s, People, New York, United’s In-Flight, Boston, Louisville Today, among others

• Articles in the following newspapers: The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Louisville Courier-Journal, among others

Publications

Poetry and short fiction, Harvest, an online magazine at Harvard University

Building with Nantucket in Mind, A Design Guidelines Manual, writer & photographer

From Hearth to Horizons, contributor, editor

A Nantucket Dog

Education

MS – Columbia University, School of Journalism

MA – Sussex University, Brighton, England. Specializing in the fiction of Virginia Woolf (Quentin Bell, thesis advisor)

BA – Centre College of Kentucky, English literature