Katherine Dalton

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Katherine Dalton has worked as a magazine editor, freelance feature writer and book editor. She started in journalism in college, working at The Yale Literary Magazine during most of its controversial few years as a national magazine of opinion based at Yale. She then worked briefly at Harper's magazine in New York, and more extensively at Chronicles magazine in Illinois, where she was a contributing editor for many years. She has has written for various publications ranging from the Wall Street Journal to the University Bookman, and was a contributor to Wendell Berry: Life and Work and Localism in the Mass Age: A Front Porch Republic Manifesto. She lives in her native Kentucky.

Recent Essays

Matt Walsh’s Racial Reckoning

Katherine Dalton - September 23, 2024

While it is impossible to be sure what the ultimate cultural importance of this movie will be, I do think Walsh has hit a nerve.

The Long Row

Katherine Dalton - March 14, 2024

So to all my friends in this haven, this meeting place, this village green—you lovers of federalism, distributism, neighbors, neighborhoods, regional accents, little platoons, and forty acres and a mule—happy anniversary.

Seeking Clarity: Wendell Berry’s New Book on Race

Katherine Dalton - October 5, 2022

These are not compassionate times—not in the public square, and not in all too much of our increasingly chaotic private life, though I think many people are trying. Mr. Berry knows this very well. And so about halfway through the book, he takes a few pages to acknowledge he was told, more than once, that his reputation would be marred by showing any sympathy to the life or plight of any Confederate.

I Hear Kentucky Singing

Katherine Dalton - November 5, 2020

Whatever our color or life or place of origin, we can all sing of our longing for home, our love of the natural world, our delight in children, and our loss.

Liberated for What

Katherine Dalton - October 11, 2018

This piece is adapted slightly from a speech given at Spring Arbor University in Michigan at September's FPR Conference. The sexual revolution as we...

Remembering Florence King

Katherine Dalton - January 17, 2016

Louisville, Kentucky. “Reading Florence King is like opening a blast furnace,” reporter Liz Trotta said of her years ago. That fire is now out....

Tom Fleming Retires

Katherine Dalton - May 21, 2015

Rockford, Illinois. After thirty-one years at Chronicles Magazine—thirty of them as editor—classicist, poet and polemicist Tom Fleming has retired. During his tenure at this small...