Kathleen Warnock
Kathleen Warnock has written more plays than you could shake a stick at. She first got into the theater as an actor, completing only one semester at acting school before realizing that it wasn’t her cup of tea. “Frankly, actors have to remember lines, and playwrights just have to write them. We’re allowed to look at the script,” says Warnock.
Her first full-length play, To The Top, is based on her experiences as a sportswriter in South Carolina and was a winner at the South Carolina Playwright’s Festival. She has also won the John Golden Award for Playwriting at Hunter College for Grieving for Genevieve and the Robert Chesley Playwriting Award in 2006 for Rock the Line. But she’s not satisfied with winning awards just for her writing. In 2004, she walked away with $50,000 on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire.
Warnock snapped up her job as an editor at Frommer’s Travel Guides partially because of all the traveling she’s done. A former “Jett-head,” she followed Joan Jett for a while, taking numerous road trips. She even wrote the liner notes to Joan Jett and the Blackhearts’ 2001 CD, Unfinished Business.
Although she loves the theater and playwriting, her erotica has been published more than any of her other writing. She does so under her “porn name” Kyle Walker. Her titillating tales have been included in the Cleis Press Best Lesbian Erotica collections from 2003–2007.
To provide an outlet for other writers to read and share their work, she curates a writing series at the KGB Bar called Drunken! Careening! Writers! in NYC’S East Village every third Thursday.
Warnock says that while many lesbian writers are rising stars in theater, there’s still a lack of diversity. “I do check very carefully when I receive subscription brochures for the major companies each year, and I notice that far too many of them either offer seasons written by all male playwrights, or only token representation of women or non-white playwrights. It’s a problem for all of us ‘others’ who actually make up a large percentage of the theatre audience.” –RD
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