Kara Kinney Cartwright is an award-winning humor writer who loves writing books and making good trouble. Her work explores what living amongst other humans requires. As it turns out, conforming with bullshit norms is not the answer. Themes of her work include:

·         What the hell?

·         Do better, people. It’s not that hard.

·         I’m rooting for you.

Over the course of her decades-long career in legal publishing, she has embarked on a side quest to save the world from assholes by satirizing bad behavior and encouraging everyone to do better. Her first book, Suburban Haiku: Poetic Dispatches from Behind the Picket Fence, was published for reluctant soccer moms under the pen name Peyton Price. Her second book, a last lecture for teenage boys entitled, Just Don’t Be An Asshole: A Surprisingly Necessary Guide to Being a Good Guy, was published in March 2020 (when you were probably too busy disinfecting your groceries to notice).

After her husband died in 2021, she was struck, not only by grief, but by the absurdity of societal expectations for people living with grief. The pitch for her next book, tentatively entitled I Hate This for You, won a humor writing residency at the 2024 Erma Bombeck Writers’ Workshop. The prize was two weeks in a Dayton, Ohio hotel room, so Kara is now also an expert on exploding hotel room coffee machines by stuffing in too many of those useless little sachets.