Kathryn Canavan's books have been praised by Erik Larson, bestselling author of Devil in the White City, and by Ed Steers Jr., bestselling author of Blood on the Moon. For more information, see www.kathryncanavan.com

A former News Journal reporter, Canavan was a first-time author at age 65. She is the author of Lincoln's Final Hours from University Press of Kentucky and True Crime Philadelphia, coming from Lyons Press in November.

She worked as a writing coach at the high school and college level. Now, as a teaching artist, she is now helping older adults like herself tell their own stories -- those who wish to have a newspaper piece published, those who are aspiring historians, those who want to write business books to share tips with young people, and those who wish to share a lifetime of memories with their families. Everyone has a story.

Canavan's creative aging writing classes are spaces where older adults can make new friends, hone their writing skills and learn to write for publication for the first time.

Everyone in the group will prodce a work of nonfiction -- a mini-memoir, a letter, a newspaper piece or a book chapter.

After working as a reporter or editor at daily newspapers in four states, Canavan left full-time employment to serve as a caregiver for a paralyzed parent. She wrote when she could, and her freelance stories and columns were published in the Philadelphia Inquirer, USA Today, The Daily Beast, he News Journal and the History News Network.

In 2011, she was named a National Health Journalism Fellow at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School of Communications and Journalism. Her fellowship project, “No Child Allowed Outside,” chronicled the health effects of gun violence on young children in Wilmington.

She has appeared as a Lincoln scholar on Discovery Channel, PBS and C-Span. She has lectured at the Lincoln Group of the District of Columbia, at John Wilkes Booth's boyhood home in Bel Air, Md., and at the Lincoln Home Historical Site in Springfield, Ill.

She is a former dinosaur docent at the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia and former long-time volunteer with Cub Pack 506, the nation’s first Cub Scout pack exclusively for boys living in shelters or on the streets.

Her second book will be published by Lyons Press in November 2021. https://www.amazon.com/True-Crime-Philadelphia-Real-Life-Boardwalk/dp/1493036157/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=true+crime+philadelphia&qid=1623544764&sr=8-1   It chronicles crime in Philadelphia -- from America's first kidnapping to the real-life killers who inspired HBO's Boardwalk Empire. 

She continues to speak about the last nine hours of President Lincoln's life, illustrating the talks with rare archival photos of the president and the ordinary people who surrounded him on that extraordinary night.