Kate Wenner

Kate Wenner grew up in California in the Cold War 1950s, went to boarding school in Vermont, and then on to college at Harvard. After freshman year she took time off and spent a year working in a communal farming village in Tanzania. On her return she wrote a memoir of her African experience, Shamba Letu: An American Girl’s Adventure in Africa (Houghton Mifflin: 1970).

Upon graduation Wenner was awarded a Michael Rockefeller Memorial Fellowship and traveled for year and a half throughout Central and South America, including an eleven-month stay in a small village high in the Andes in Peru. Back in the United States she taught creative writing to prison inmates and women’s groups, and moved to New York City to begin a two decade-long career as a print and television journalist. For fourteen years she worked as an award-winning producer for ABC 20/20, where she was responsible for profiles that ranged from Stephen Hawking to the real-life Madame Butterfly, as well as many ground-breaking reports such as her Emmy-nominated presentation of the life-long impact of fetal alcohol syndrome.

In 1996 Wenner left 20/20 to write fiction. Her first novel, Setting Fires (Scribner 2000, Berkley Signature 2002), grew out of the family secret her father revealed in videotaped conversations shortly before he died of cancer. In conjunction with the publication of Setting Fires, Wenner edited those videotapes into a half-hour documentary. Since then she has traveled extensively showing her film “Time With My Father” and speaking to Jewish audiences about her father’s journey of reconciliation and her own journey back to Judaism.

Wenner’s second novel, Dancing With Einstein (Scribner 2004), grew out of her childhood fears of the atom bomb and her belief that her generation was affected in deep and lasting ways by the ever-present specter of nuclear holocaust.

Wenner and her husband, artist Gil Eisner, live in New York City and the Berkshires and are the parents of two college-age children.