Kate Flora papers, 1997-2008
Collection Scope and Content
This collection contains entire drafts of three published books: Playing God (1999), Liberty or Death (1999) and Stalking Death — The Seventh Thea Kozak Mystery (2008). Drafts contain editorial comments. Also includes reviews.
Biographical/Historical Note
Born in 1949, Kate Clark Flora grew up on a poultry farm in Union, Maine, where her mother, author A. Carman Clark, lived until her death in 2005. Flora attended the University of Maine, graduated from Tufts in 1971 and Northeastern University School of Law in 1976. She served as a Maine assistant attorney general before leaving law to write full-time.
She is the author of 15 mysteries, including her Thea Kozak series, Chosen for Death (1994), Death in a Funhouse Mirror (1995), Death at the Wheel (1996), An Educated Death (1997/1999), Death in Paradise (1998/2000), Liberty or Death (2003) and Stalking Death (2008). Flora published Silent Buddy (1995) under the name Kate Clark Flora and Steal Away (1998) under her given name, Katharine Clark. She is also the author of Playing God: A Joe Burgess Mystery (2006). In 2006, she co-authored the non-fiction Finding Amy: The True Story of Murder in Maine with Joseph K. Loughlin of the Portland, Maine, police department. The book was nominated for an Edgar Award in 2007 and was a finalist for the Maine Literary Awards. One of her short stories appeared in the 2007 anthology Sisters on the Case, a collection of mystery tales by past international presidents (of which Flora was one) of Sisters in Crime, a women crime writers membership organization. Flora’s profile of Elinor Lipman appeared in The Larcom Review; her profile of Maine’s first poet laureate, Kate Barnes, appeared in The Wolf Moon Press and was later anthologized. Other short pieces have appeared in ForeWord Magazine and the Northeastern Law School alumni magazine.
In 2003 Flora cofounded Level Best Books, a cooperative publishing annual crime story anthologies by New England writers. She has contributed to and co-edited its titles Undertow (2003), Riptide (2004), Windchill (2005), Seasmoke (2006), Stillwaters (2007), Deadfall (2008) and Quarry (2009). In 2010, she contributed to its anthology Thin Ice and ended her tenure as one of Level Best’s editors. Flora has taught writing at the Cambridge (Mass.) Center for Adult Education, the Cape Cod Writer’s Conference and Grub Street in Boston. She frequently speaks on Sisters in Crime panels and to library organizations. She divides her time between Bailey Island, Maine, and Concord, Massachusetts with her husband, lawyer Kenneth Cohen and their two sons, Max and Jake.