Katherine Dykstra holds an MFA in creative writing from the New School. She served as senior nonfiction editor at Guernica for many years and taught narrative nonfiction in NYU's continuing studies program. Her essays have been published in The Washington Post, Crab Orchard Review, The Common, Shenandoah, Gulf Coast, Brain, Child, Poets and Writers, Real Simple and the Random House anthology 20 Something Essays by 20 Something Writers, among other places. Her work has been included in the "Notables" section of both the 2015 and 2016 Best American Essays collections edited by Ariel Levy and Jonathan Franzen, respectively. She was one of three finalists for the 2014 John Guyon Literary Nonfiction Prize. She won first place in the 2012 Waterman Fund Essay Contest and placed third in the 2013 Real Simple Life Lessons Essay Contest. She was recently named an "artist to watch" by Creative Capital for her work on the Paula Oberbroeckling story, which is the topic of her debut nonfiction book What Happened to Paula: On the Death of An American Girl, published by W.W. Norton. What Happened to Paula received a starred and boxed Publishers Weekly review and was designated a New York Times Summer Read, a People magazine Best New Book, one of Crimereads' Top Ten Books of 2021, a Boston Globe Book of Summer, an Observer Best Book of Summer, and a Crimereads Best Book of Summer.