Contact/About KJ
KJ Dell’Antonia is a novelist and former journalist and editor at to the New York Times, where she covered the personal and policy aspects of family for many years.
She grew up in Texas and Kansas and attended Kansas State University, then spent her twenties locked in a struggle to marry her upbringing with the mysterious ways of Manhattan and East Coast culture and reconcile career choices that included practicing law at Cravath, Swaine and Moore and the New York County District Attorney's office with her childhood desire to be Anne of Green Gables, only with more publishing success. During the first internet boom, she became the worst Vice President of Business Development ever at an otherwise successful start-up.
Her subsequent layoff proved the perfect excuse to finally pursue journalism, and a move to a small town in New Hampshire didn’t stop her from eventually taking over the New York Times’ Motherlode blog. Her first book, How to Be a Happier Parent, developed as a result of her work there, but her heart was always in fiction. Her memories of the two chicken restaurants in the Kansas towns where her parents grew up sparked the creation of Chicken Mimi’s and Chicken Frannie’s, the two restaurants at the center of The Chicken Sisters, and the story grew from there. Her second novel, In Her Boots, is about the gap between the adults we think we have become, the child our mother will always see and our horrible fear that our mother is right—a story that grew from the complex relationship that every author has with the successful self we portray on the outside and the doubting voices that will always hammer away inside of our heads.
KJ lives in New Hampshire with her husband, four children and assorted horses, chickens, dogs and cats. She is the co-host of the #AmWriting Podcast and is hard at work on her third novel.
For interviews and appearances, please contact Ashley Hewlett.
To contact KJ directly, email is also best. I read and appreciate every email I receive, although I don't always have time to respond, at least not quickly--but the email will reach me.