Beth Kephart

Beth Kephart is an American author of non-fiction, poetry and young adult fiction for adults and teens. Kephart has written and published over ten books and has received several grants and awards for her writing. She was a National Book Award Finalist for her book "A Slant of the Sun: One Child’s Courage." She lives in Philadelphia with her husband and son. She is a writing partner in the marketing communications firm, Fusion Communications, and occasionally teaches and lectures at the University of Pennsylvania.

Kephart was first published in Iowa Woman magazine and has said she was writing poems from the time she was quite young, and that she very influenced by music, the sound of words. In a Harper Collins interview, she stated: "I loved to sing. I loved to perform, with my brother and sister, to the sound tracks of The Music Man or My Fair Lady or Windjammer. I always had rhymes sliding around in my head. So that even as I got older, I would return to Robert Louis Stevenson and Hans Christian Andersen to see how they created what they created. I would read F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway and Sinclair Lewis, also, to learn about how words fit together. And then, of course, there was Black Beauty." [emphasis added].

Kephart is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania and was a participant at the Bread Loaf Writing Conference, Middlebury, Vermont, with Jayne Anne Phillips; 1996 Prague Writing Conference, Czech Republic with William Gass and Jayne Anne Phillips; and 1995 Spoleto Writing Conference, Spoleto, Italy with Rosellen Brown and Reginald Gibbons, 1994.

Kephart is a prolific writer and reviewer and has penned reviews and essays for various publications, including:

• The New York Times
• Chicago Tribune
• Salon
• The Washington Post
• Book World
• The Wall Street Journal Europe
• Philadelphia (magazine)
• The Philadelphia Inquirer
• Family Circle
• Parenting
• Real Simple
• Reader's Digest
• New Jersey Life
• Pennsylvania Gazette
• Main Line Today

Undercover, her first book for young adults, was named a 2007 best book of the year by Amazon.com, Kirkus, and School Library Journal.

Honors and awards

• Speakeasy Poetry Prize (2005)
• Pew Fellowships in the Arts (2005)
• BookSense Pick (2005)
• National Endowment for the Arts Grant (2000)
• Leeway Grant for Creative Nonfiction (1998)
• Salon Best Book of the Year (1998)
• National Book Award, Nonfiction Finalist (1998)
• Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Top Fiction Grant (1997)
• Bread Loaf Merit Scholar for Fiction (1996)