Faculty Profile: Katie Fallon
What I am about to tell you is absolutely true. It is not fiction. It
is non-fiction. It is about non-fiction and one woman at Tech who loves
it. Katie Fallon is a creative writing instructor and non-fiction writer
in the Department of English. She is also known as the woman who kisses
birds. On the lips. Well, on the beaks.
Katie's love of birds is a lifelong relationship and a source for much of her writing. She has a manuscript called With Hurt Hawks, a collection of related nature-themed personal essays, mostly drafted during her graduate school days at West Virginia University. Half or more of these essays have been published and are forthcoming in literary journals.
Her current creative nonfiction book project is tentatively called Cerulean Blues, and centers around the rapid decline of the cerulean warbler, an interior forest songbird whose core breeding area is located in the central Appalachians. Katie explains that reasons for their decline include habitat loss due to deforestation and mountaintop removal coal mining on their breeding grounds, and deforestation for coffee plantations on their wintering grounds in the Andes Mountains of South America.
Katie's love of birds is seconded and supported closely by her passion for saving mountaintops and wildlife habitats in West Virginia, and it goes without saying, around the world. Last year she flew in a small plane with (poet and Tech professor and Appalachian scholar) Jeff Mann over destroyed landscapes in West Virginia and listened to the stories of many of the people affected by the devastation. This is why Katie Fallon writes non-fiction: there are true stories that need telling.
This past summer, her "Summer of the Cerulean Warbler," Katie went in the field with wildlife biologists working on cerulean projects in West Virginia and Tennessee and interviewed several cerulean experts. She believes that spending time outdoors talking about birds was pretty much as good as it gets.
I know that Katie is a dedicated and beloved teacher and an amazing writer, but she is also a friend. In the first week of classes, she confided to me that there was trouble at home: "I think my Love Bird is mad at me" she told me. I could not help but think that maybe he is, but it can't last long.
By Aileen Murphy, September 2007