Kathleen Rooney is an American writer, publisher, editor, and educator. She is a founding editor of Rose Metal Press, a publisher of literary work in hybrid genres, and a founding member of Poems While You Wait, a team of poets and their typewriters who compose commissioned poetry on demand.

Her recent books include the national best-seller Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk (St. Martin’s Press, 2017) and the novel Cher Ami and Major Whittlesey (Penguin, 2020). Her latest collection Where Are the Snows, winner of the X.J. Kennedy Prize, was published by Texas Review Press in Fall 2022. In September 2023, her novel From Dust to Stardust, based on the life and work of silent movie star Colleen Moore, was released by Lake Union Press.

Rooney is also the author of numerous books of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction, including the novel O, Democracy! (Fifth Star Press, 2014); the novel in poems Robinson Alone (Gold Wake Press, 2012), based on the life and work of Weldon Kees; the essay collection For You, For You I Am Trilling These Songs (Counterpoint, 2010); and the art modeling memoir Live Nude Girl: My Life as an Object (University of Arkansas Press, 2009).

Her first book, Reading with Oprah: The Book Club That Changed America (University of Arkansas Press, 2005), and her first poetry collection, Oneiromance (an epithalamion), won the 2007 Gatewood Prize from feminist publisher Switchback Books. With Elisa Gabbert, she co-authored the poetry collection That Tiny Insane Voluptuousness (Otoliths, 2008) and the chapbook The Kind of Beauty That Has Nowhere to Go (Hyacinth Girl Press, 2013).

She is a co-editor of Rene Magritte: Selected Writings (University of Minnesota Press, 2016) with fellow DePaul professor Eric Plattner. Her reviews and criticism have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The Poetry Foundation website, The New York Times Book Review, Allure, The Chicago Review of Books, The Chicago Tribune, The Paris Review, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Nation, and elsewhere. She lives in Chicago with her spouse, the writer Martin Seay.