Just don’t ask how I got the name

Kit-Bacon Gressitt was spawned by a Southern Baptist creationist and a liberal social worker in the northern most southern state, Maryland, hence K-B’s fondness for grits, spoonbread, and steamed blue crabs with Old Bay.  

Having inherited the requisite sense of humor to survive family dinner-table debates and the imagination to avoid them, she subsequently headed to California, where she’s had several professional lives. The last one to require adult attire, concluded with her flipping the bird to the corporate patriarchy and going back to school.

After earning an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of California Riverside/Palm Desert, and traveling from Western Kentucky to Cuba to research her narrative-nonfiction thesis, she now teaches Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at California State University San Marcos, while contemplating revolution.

To that end, K-B has a penchant for political protest; she’s the publisher and a founding editor of the intersectional feminist literary journal Writers Resist; and she delights in fomenting progressive change in any way that won't land her in the hoosegow.

She also teaches writing workshops of various flavors, hosts the Writers Read author series at Fallbrook Library, in San Diego County, and organizes the annual Fallbrook Writers Conference, which is free—we’re all about accessibility.

K-B’s narrative nonfiction, commentary, and political fiction address feminism, power and oppression, social justice, and the climate crisis. These works, and K-B’s book reviews and author features, have been published in Hard Crackers, Evening Street Review and Evening Street Press (Spring 2019), Not My President: The Anthology of Dissent (Thoughtcrime Press, December 2017), Ducts, Publishers Weekly, The Missing Slate, Trivia: Feminist Voices, Ms. Magazine blog, the former Gay San Diego and North County Times, and others.

A postscript from K-B: “I’m a huge, honking fan of reproductive justice. Politics and dogma don't belong between my legs or anyone else's. However, in those states where the patriarchy prevails, there are always folks who know how to put a bit of sterile tubing, some suction, and a mayonnaise jar to good use.”

And why not ask about the name? Because she hasn’t yet come up with a good story about it, but it is her mother’s fault.