About Us

Kate Harding is a Chicago-based writer, editor, crazy dog person and humorless feminist. Her first book, Lessons from the Fat-o-Sphere: Quit Dieting and Declare a Truce with Your Body, co-written with Marianne “The Rotund” Kirby, was published by Perigee Books in spring 2009. She’s also a regular contributor to Salon’s Broadsheet and can be found on Facebook and Twitter. More info about Kate, along with occasional posts on writing, reading, and publishing, can be found at her author site.

If you want to know more about the genesis of this blog, go here. If you want to know something else, contact Kate at katesblog at gmail dot com. (Although she never, ever thought she’d become one of the people who says shit like this, she appreciates every e-mail like you wouldn’t believe but cannot respond to every one personally.)

Fillyjonk is a former Kid With Issues turned Adult With Chip on Shoulder. Every year or so she gets sick of her hair color, and every couple of years she gets ferocious wardrobe ennui, but she’s had the same best friend for half her life. She has never been thin, or cool; one time she got popular, but at that point she was far too old to appreciate it. She is prickly as all get-out and asks that you address all complaints about that directly to your butt. Contact Fillyjonk at babyflavored at gmail dot com, and her alter ego at auntfattie at gmail dot com.

Sweet Machine is a twentysomething thirtysomething queer grad student in Chicagoland, where she studies too much and fails to dress appropriately for the weather. She has been a fat kid, a thin teen, a chubby teen, a fat adult, a thin adult, and an in-between adult. She is particularly interested in the grad school-y aspects of fat, such as its intersections with gender and disability. She takes her pseudonym from a Mark Doty poem. Contact Sweet Machine at sweet dot machine dot sp at gmail dot com.

A Sarah is a thirtysomething junior professor of religion, mother of two boys, and a lifelong inbetweenie/small fat.  She is, she reckons, the least technologically savvy of all the Shapely Prose bloggers, as evidenced by (among other things) her inability to remember how to attach her icon to her posts.  She trusts that this is a charming quirk rather than a chronic annoyance.  A Sarah loves Manhattans, benign communes, and “Murder, She Wrote”; and she will never, ever, ever give up shampooing. Contact A Sarah at teenageradiostar at gmail dot com.

Fillyjonk and Sweet Machine joined the Shapely Prose family — or, rather, made it a family, instead of just an exercise in narcissism for Kate — in August 2007. A Sarah came on board in May 2009, and then we all got really busy and stopped blogging so much. Sorry about that.