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Kate Schatz

@k8shots

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Givin a shit since '78. NYT-bestselling author of RAD WOMEN books, DO THE WORK, WHERE THE GIRLS WERE. I Love What You’re Doing on @substack❤️🏳️‍🌈✊🏼

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📚BRING THIS FUN AUTHOR TO YOUR SCHOOL! (Or library! Or…other kind of space that wants to host an author visit?!📚

Hey it’s me, the person who wrote all these books and can barely hold them for this silly selfie! I’m here to tell you that I’m currently booking Author Visits (in-person and virtual) for the 2025/26 school year. K-12! College too! Link in bio, or contact me directly.

Visiting schools, libraries, and other community spaces is truly one of the best parts about my career. I absolutely love sharing my books with students of all ages, and connecting the stories in the books to the lives we are leading.

And in this moment, when histories are being erased, books are being banned, voices are being silenced, curriculums are being white-washed, and budgets are being gutted, I am more committed than ever to sharing my ***thoroughly-researched, fact-based, bestselling books about actual histories that really happened and actual factual people who literally existed and will always exist no matter what*** and making my author visits accessible and available, inspiring and empowering.

Hit me up. Tell a friend. Bring me to your school. I’m fun and friendly and also always me.

💕✌️😘 by @k8shots

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a year ago

I’m pretty much exploding with excitement about the cover of WHERE THE GIRLS WERE, my novel coming out 3/3/26 on @thedialpress. I’m also pretty much exploding with excitement that I wrote a whole-ass novel, that I FINISHED (and sold!) a whole-ass novel, and that it will be out in the world for you to read.

I’ll be sharing lots more about the book and the histories and stories that inspired it in the coming months, both here and on my Substack and hopefully other places in print, on air, and online.

But for now please enjoy this stunning cover that totally nails the vibe I was hoping for—San Francisco in 1968, a young woman on the verge of so much, and the swirling chaos of an unexpected pregnancy in the pre-Roe era.

Thanks to @thedialpress for being a dream team, @people for the cover reveal (!!!), @woodsarawood for her illustrations, my wife Lauren for the new headshots, and, of course, my mother, who said yes when I asked if I could write a whole-ass novel inspired by her.

Link to preorder and subscribe to substack etc etc in bio.

More to come!

✌️ 💕✊🏽 taken in San Francisco, California by @k8shots

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a year ago

✨Write 25 Teaching Artist Announcement✨

Kate Schatz is a feminist author, educator, and public speaker. She’s the New York Times-bestselling author of the “Rad Women” book series; the novel Where the Girls Were; the 33 ⅓ book Rid of Me: A Story; and Do the Work: An Anti-Racist Activity Book, co-written with W. Kamau Bell. She lives in the Bay Area with her wife, three children, and pets.

In all she does, Kate is committed to sharing radical histories that shine light on the marginalized people who’ve truly made America (and the world) great: the people of color, the immigrants, the queers, the punks, the weirdos, the artists, the workers, and the women.

Kate will be leading a workshop called: Writers (Un)block: A Generative Creative Writing Workshop

Description:
While the imagination is limitless, our perspectives aren’t, and it’s common for writers, artists, storytellers, and creative humans to feel a bit stuck when it comes to inspiration, ideas, source material, and even language itself. Some call this “Writers Block”—Kate calls it time to shake things up and try prompts and exercises based on everything from found objects and weather patterns to song lyrics and overheard conversations. Together we’ll remind ourselves that we are constantly surrounded by inspiration—we just have to look closely, listen deeply, and be open to new ways of noticing and creating.

Write 25 Details:
📅 November 11–15, 2026
📍 Doe Bay Resort, Orcas Island, WA
🎟️ Registration is now open @ writedoebay.com by @k8shots

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12 days ago

25 years ago I was in the habit of writing incredibly long emails that I would send to everyone I knew who had an email address. And, apparently, my mom would often print them out. And save them! I’m so glad she did.

I recently found one that I wrote on September 12, 2001, and then one I wrote a year later, on September 11, 2002. They’re like little Yahoo dot com time capsules! I had a lot to say—about America and fear and politics and the bullshit of racism and war and xenophobia. And I obviously still do.

We all have our 9/11 stories, and I’m a little surprised by how emotional I feel today as I read others, and reflect on my own. I wasn’t there—I was on the opposite coast, in Oakland (with @joelrobinow!), had just graduated from college and returned to the states after an idyllic summer on an island off Sicily with @chiarabarzini.

When I look back at these (incredibly verbose and cringey but also charmingly heartfelt) emails written by my 21 year old self, I see someone who had always cared a whole lot, who had always had big opinions and big ideas and big beliefs, and who was coming into a full adult awareness of what it means to hold all those big brain things in a really fucked up world. And how to take all that thought and big ol vocabulary and turn it into action.

I guess I can say that 9/11 turned me into an activist. If my college years at UC Santa Cruz radicalized me on an intellectual level, the years that followed the attacks—the anti-war protests, the organizing, the blocking of intersections and getting arrested because I didn’t believe in bullshit wars, the making of many tshirts and signs—taught me how to show up and speak out, how to think and respond to political manipulation, how to articulate complex stances and then stand on that business, and how to find my people and work to bring others along with me.

The homemade tshirt I wore most in those days read MY GRIEF IS NOT A CRY FOR WAR and I wish I my mom had saved that one! But at least I’m glad to have these printed out yahoo emails from what feels like a million years ago.
🩷✊🏼🩷 by @k8shots

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19 days ago

SHIFTING THE NARRATIVE:
A Political and Personal Examination of Reproductive Justice

Join the Alice B. Toklas LGBTQ Democratic Club on Monday, September 14, from 6–7:30 PM for a conversation on reproductive rights, bodily autonomy, and access to care.

This timely panel brings together three influential Bay Area advocates: Gretchen Sisson, Ph.D., a sociologist whose data on adoption was cited in the Supreme Court’s Dobbs dissent and whose leadership in Emerge America is building a pipeline for Democratic women to hold office; Kate Schatz, a queer feminist New York Times-bestselling author who co-founded Solidarity Sundays to build nationwide networks of local feminist groups; and Susan Kiyo Ito, an acclaimed educator and theatrical performer who has spent decades exploring adoption stigma and reproductive privacy through performance and literature on stages across the United States.

Together, they bridge the decades between the pre-Roe "Baby Scoop" era and our post-Dobbs reality, unearthing the silenced stories of motherhood, systemic pressure, and the true path forward for reproductive justice.

📅 Monday, September 14
🕕 6:00–7:30 PM
📍 The Academy SF
🏳️‍🌈 2166 Market St, San Francisco, CA 94114 taken in The Academy SF by @k8shots

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22 days ago

The raddest American woman. Thank you Gloria Steinem for EVERYTHING. For leading and shaping and caring and teaching and fighting and laughing and being so damn cool the whole damn time. She shaped my sense of self and culture and modeled radical intelligent curious empathic intersectional and intergenerational feminism. I’m so glad I got to grow up with her as an example of how to be a white feminist who listens and learns and shows up and does the work. The work she’s been doing in the public eye AND behind the scenes for all these decades is beyond. It’s everything. It’s the future. I love you Gloria. by @k8shots

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a month ago

It’s Virgo season and Writing Wednesdays are back! Starting Wednesday 9/2, join me at 9am PT/noon ET for an hour on Zoom. I’ll say hi, give a writing prompt, then we write quietly together, cameras on or off, whatever floats your creative boat. Link to the zoom in my bio, or just DM me. It’s good to schedule time for writing! Make it a practice, a habit! Every Wednesday except for very occasionally when I forget but I really try not to 🩷🩷🩷🩷🩷 by @k8shots

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a month ago

And the joke’s on themmmm

from Dolly Parton: Here I Am on @pbs by @k8shots

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a month ago

🚨RAD EVENT ALERT!!!🚨

Do you care about reproductive rights?! Yes! You do!

Are you in or near Oakland on the evening of Wed July 29?! Yes?! Great! Please come join us at @yourlocaleconomy for this seriously epic panel of women who really really really know the landscape and the realities of ab0rt!0n care in the U.S. right now.

Featuring Megan Jeyifo the exec director of @chicagoabortionfund, the largest fund in the country that has supported over 50,000 callers since 2022. Plus the incredible Dr Khiara Bridges and Dr Shelley Sella and Dr Michelle Oberman. And me!

Link to RSVP is in my bio! I know it’s summer and our brains are mush but come hang and learn and feel engaged and informed and empowered! by @k8shots

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2 months ago

Celebrating our three-year wedding anniversary with a Deep South roadtrip filled with learning and researching and bearing deep unflinching witness to history and the ongoing journeys toward justice and joy.

So many highlights and so much to unpack (and we’re not done yet!) but today after many many hours at the (truly phenomenal, nearly indescribable) @legacysites we got to link up with TC from @tko_alabama! We are two of the *many* people who have a pansy tattoo as part of the @a1000pansies project started by @cedretattoos which raises funds for The Knight and Orchids Society, a Black and trans-led non-profit based in Selma and Montgomery that does incredible, life-saving community work. Ya’ll know what it’s like to be Black and queer and gender-non-conforming in Alabama right now?! TC does, and so do the folks they serve on the daily, with compassion and love and constantly-evolving strategies. So great to sit and have drinks with them in one of Montgomery’s few openly queer-friendly establishments.

So! For our anniversary I’d love to raise some money for them! Lauren and I get to move through this world as openly queer women with an enormous amount of privilege. We feel safe holding hands on this trips, and when folks ask “Ya’ll sisters?” we feel safe laughing and saying “Even better! Wives!” We get to do that. We can access the health care we need, we’re safe in our jobs and our homes, and the politicians who run our home state don’t pass legislation that actively threatens our lives.

So my darling people, please consider sending a few dollars to @tko_alabama. Donations go to direct support—from rent support to transportation to bills to helping clients access gender-affirming care, STI and HIV testing, and so much more.

Thank you, and Happy Pride. And happy anniversary Lauren—being wives is THE BEST! by @k8shots

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3 months ago

2 Rad American — and one British — Women at today's Bay Area Book Festival.

left to right:
Kate Schatz, author of "Where the Girls Were" (a new novel) & "Rad American Women A-Z "(w/City Lights) & outstanding moderator ❤️

Rae Alexandra, author of "Unsung Heroines: 35 Women Who Changed the Bay Area" (w/City Lights, too). This book thing is ON! 😎

&

Jewelle Gomez, author of "The Gilda Stories" (w/City Lights, as well!). We adore you 😍

Appreciation to everyone who stopped by our table today and got some cheap thrills via discounted City Lights publications and conversation with our staff 🌻

And our thanks go out to the staff and volunteers of the Bay Area Book Festival. You did it! We had an amazing day! 💝 taken in Hotel Shattuck Plaza by @k8shots

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4 months ago

been a lot a lot of book hustle work travel these past few months so it felt really really good to close it out with the wife and bestie for some California adventure time. Carpinteria is the best, long live Jelly Bowl, and I finally got to live out my Island of the Blue Dolphins dreams by exploring the unbelievably beautiful Channel Islands. Thank you forever @radtricks 🩷🐬☀️ by @k8shots

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4 months ago