Kate Harding is co-author of Lessons from the Fat-o-Sphere: Quit Dieting and Declare a Truce with Your Body and founder of what was for a time the internet’s most popular body acceptance blog, Shapely Prose. She has contributed to numerous online publications, including Salon, Jezebel, The Guardian, and the L.A. Times, and published essays in the anthologies Yes Means Yes: Visions of Female Sexual Power and a World Without Rape (a Publishers Weekly Best Book of 2009); Feed Me: Writers Dish About Food, Eating, Weight and Body Image; and Madonna and Me, due out in March 2012.

Kate is currently at work on a collection of essays about how her life was not, in fact, changed by reading classic literature (at least, not when she was supposed to). She’s also contributing to The Book of Jezebel, forthcoming from Grand Central Publishing. She teaches fiction and nonfiction writing at StoryStudio Chicago and StoryStudio North Shore, where she will be Writer in Residence throughout 2012.

A graduate of the University of Toronto and the MFA in writing program at Vermont College of Fine Arts, Kate lives in Chicago with her husband and their pug-corgi puppy, Murray.