Erika Krouse

Erika Krouse has taught at Lighthouse since 2008; she is a Book Project mentor and a winner of the Lighthouse Beacon Award. Erika's most recent collection of short stories, Save Me, Stranger, is out with Flatiron Books in January 2025. It has garnered starred reviews from Kirkus and Booklist, and praise from Louise Erdrich, Adam Johnson, Ann Beattie, Aimee Bender, and Vauhini Vara.

Erika's recent memoir, Tell Me Everything: The Story of a Private Investigation, is a winner of the Edgar Award, the Colorado Book Award, and the Housatonic Book Award. Tell Me Everything is also a New York Times Editors’ Choice pick, a Book of the Month Club pick, a People Pick, and has appeared on Best Book lists for Kirkus Reviews, Slate, BookPage, and Jezebel. Contenders (novel) was a finalist for the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award; Come Up and See Me Sometime (short stories), was a New York Times Notable Book and won the Paterson Fiction Award. 

Erika's short stories have been published in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Esquire.com, Ploughshares, One Story, The Kenyon Review, The Iowa Review, The Southern Review, Conjuncdtions, Colorado Review, and other places. Erika has also written everything from book reviews for The New York Times to horoscopes for Glamour. The only thing she doesn’t like writing is her bio.

What Erika looks for in a Book Project mentee: I believe all writers can succeed if they have an ability to learn, a passion for the subject, a strong work ethic, something to say, and a great writing education. My groups follow an extensive two-year curriculum covering narrative structure and technique, and we spend a lot of time on plot and character motivation. We also collaborate to create an individualized and sustainable writing process for each mentee. I seek mentees from all backgrounds to create diverse and healthy groups.

I have a special interest in: stories in any prose genre (short stories, essays, novels, and memoirs), non-US settings, literary fiction and nonfiction, dark/edgy work, unusual structures and stories, antiheroes, humor, “voicey” prose (in first person or close third), strong protagonists, quirky characters, mysteries, true crime, social realism, feminism, magical realism, historical fiction, and anything well-written. Subject-wise, I like to read about crime, jobs and work, race and discrimination, the arts, music, immigration/immigrants/expats, violence/murder, dysfunctional families, martial arts, ghosts, mythology, mental states, interpersonal politics, countercultures,  physics, extreme settings, runaways, travel, prison, mental institutions, the military, outsiders, people behaving badly, and anything weird and unusual. I'm interested in who you are and what you have to say.