Picture of Kaethe Schwehn

Kaethe Schwehn

Kaethe Schwehn was born in Chicago but she’s lived beside a lake in Minneapolis, on a sleepy street in Indiana, in a rural mountain village in Washington, across from a Mattress Mart in California, upon the side of a volcano in Ecuador, near the coupling of train cars in Montana, and between the dusty walls of a farmhouse in Iowa. Now she lives in Northfield, Minnesota where the re-enactment of a bank raid each year is softened with the scent of chocolate breakfast cereal cooking in the Malt O Meal factory down the road.  

Schwehn is the author of The Rending and the Nest, Tailings: A Memoir, and Tanka & Me and the co-editor of Claiming Our Callings: Toward a New Understanding of Vocation in the Liberal Arts. Her poems and prose can be found in journals such as Crazyhorse, Pleiades, jubilat, Witness, Minnesota Review and the anthology Fiction on a Stick. She’s been the recipient of a Minnesota Book Award for Creative Nonfiction, a Minnesota State Arts Board Grant, a Loft Mentor Series Award, and the Donald Justice Poetry Prize. 

Schwehn studied creative writing at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and the University of Montana and earned a BA from Gustavus Adolphus College.  She currently teaches composition and creative writing at St. Olaf College.
Cover of The Gospel of Salome features gold details, botanical imagery, and ancient motifs.

The Gospel of Salome

In 38 CE Alexandria, Salome, a skilled physician with a past she’s fought to suppress, struggles to navigate the complex landscape of first-century womanhood and

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