Mattie McClane (Kristine Kaiser) papers

Mattie McClane (legally, Kristine Kaiser) is a novelist, poet, and journalist originally from Moline, Illinois. She graduated from Augustana College with a bachelor’s degree in the Humanities in 1989. She later obtained an M.A. in English at the University of Louisville in 1995 and an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from the University of North Carolina, Wilmington in 1999.

From 1989 to 2005, she worked as a political columnist for newspapers within the Quad Cities, including several dailies in Rock Island, the Moline Dispatch, and Quad-Cities Online. She continued working as a columnist at The High Point Enterprise in High Point, North Carolina from 2007 to 2014. She also contributed commentaries to the Raleigh News and Observer, Winston-Salem Journal, the Greensboro News and Record, the Fayetteville Observer, the Louisville Courier Journal, the Charleston Gazette, and the Des Moines Register, along with numerous others.

Written under the pseudonym, Mattie McClane, her creative writings include books of poetry, short stories, and novels. Her works often involve political, feminist, and religious aspects. She is the author of Night Ship: A Voyage of Discovery (2003) (2017), River Hymn: Essays Evangelical and Political (2004), Wen Wilson (2009) (2022), Unbuttoning Light: The Collected Short Stories of Mattie McClane (2012), Now Time (2013), Stations of the Cross (2016), The Mother Word: An Exploration of the Visual (2017), Simeon's Canticle (2018), The Song of the Grackle (2019), The Magnificent Light of Morning (2021), To Free the Sisters of Mary (2022), and At the Edge of Cities Burning (2023).

Outside her writing career, she participated as a member and served in various leadership roles within the League of Women Voters in Iowa, Kentucky, and North Carolina. She currently lives in Davenport, Iowa with her husband, John Kaiser.