Kerry Howley is an essayist, screenwriter, and the author of Bottom’s Up and the Devil Laughs, a New York Times Top Ten Book of the Year and finalist for the National Books Critics Circle Award. In the Times, critic Jennifer Szalai called Bottom’s Up “riveting and darkly funny and in all senses of the word, unclassifiable.”

Howley’s first book, Thrown, was a pick for best-of-the-year lists in Time, Salon, Slate, and many other venues. Writing in Salon, Lydia Kiesling called Thrown  “extraordinary,” “incredibly bracing,” and “reminiscent of some of the boldest voices of twentieth-century fiction.” Novelist Lev Grossman called it “probably the most bizarre and fascinating book I’ve read this year” in the pages of Time, adding: “The precision of Howley’s prose reminds me of Joan Didion or David Foster Wallace. She writes like somebody in ecstasy.”

Howley is the screenwriter behind WINNER, a film directed by Susanna Fogel starring Emilia Jones, Connie Britton, and Zach Galifianakus. The coming of age comedy debuted at Sundance in 2024. In 2020 Howley left a professorship at the University of Iowa’s celebrated Nonfiction MFA program to join the staff of New York Magazine, where she has published essays about Erewhon, Jorie Graham, and January 6th. Her work has appeared in The Paris Review, Best American Sportswriting, The New York Times Magazine, and Harper’s. A Lannan Foundation Fellow and three-time National Magazine Award nominee, she lives in Los Angeles.