Today we’d like to introduce you to Kathryn Brown Ramsperger.
Hi Kathryn, it’s an honor to have you on the platform. Thanks for taking the time to share your story with us – to start maybe you can share some of your backstory with our readers?
I’m a lifelong writer with a passion for storytelling, research, and travel. My career has taken me from local journalism to National Geographic, and later to the International Red Cross & Red Crescent. I’ve lived and worked in E. and W. Europe, N. and S. Africa, and the Middle East. Along the way, I’ve witnessed both incredible courage and the devastating effects of war, poverty, illness, and displacement. For 25 years, I observed the financial crisis an illness brings, the heartache leaving one’s country and family can etch in the soul, and the homelessness one careless lit match can leave behind. I also lived through my mother’s neurodegenerative illness and homelessness.
When my (now adult) children began middle school, I launched a home-based business in consulting and coaching, which also gave me the time and freedom to write the books I’d dreamed of since winning the Hollins University Fiction Award when I graduated. I’ve published two award-winning novels, one of which became an Amazon bestseller. My greatest reward has been hearing from readers whose perspectives were changed by my work.
I love to watch my characters transform on the page. It feels as though I transform with them.
Would you say it’s been a smooth road, and if not what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?
I’ve survived melanoma, jotted notes on the fringes of war, experienced a stillbirth, and raised two incredibly unique children to adulthood. I came into my own as feminism was coming into hers, so I experienced glass-ceiling-stay-in-your-cubicle discrimination from both men and women. Yet my earliest life lessons came in childhood.
When I was 12, my mother was diagnosed with Parkinson’s, and my family’s world shattered With no insurance, and a father who lost his job caring for my mother, my family dove from the middle class to food stamps and homelessness. A young woman in the 1970s and 1980s, I began searching for love and security everywhere else but home, as I tried to recreate the middle-class life of my early years.
With no road map, I got a full ride at a prestigious women’s liberal arts college in Virginia, an internship at my local newspaper…and another at a television station…and eventually the White House.
By junior year, prosperity seemed again within reach.
But first love nearly derailed it all.
Written 45 years later, my book MY FIRST FIANCE: My Early Misadventures in Love, Squalor, Misogyny, and Mayhem reflects on what’s changed for women between World War II and today. What hasn’t. And how we cope and maintain our identity in the midst of it all.
Can you tell our readers more about what you do and what you think sets you apart from others?
I write about brave and tenacious women who leap over borders and boundaries in life, illness, career, and even war. Yet decisions of the heart may bring them to their knees.
My work explores all aspects of love, especially love in war and loving a whole person as opposed to a person’s art, other gift, or influence..
My journalism and humanitarian careers inspired my two published award-winning novels.
In The Shores of Our Souls, Qasim, a Lebanese U.N. official, and Dianna, a Southern museum researcher, navigate love and war from the Middle East to Manhattan and back again. The sequel, A Thousand Flying Things, is now available online and in indie bookstores.
Qasim, a Lebanese Muslim U.N. official, and Dianna, a researcher for the Met, meet under a disco ball in a smoky bar and unexpectedly fall in love. Their bond survives across continents, cultures, and family judgment. When they reunite in Africa during the South Sudan civil war, Dianna is torn between saving a child and rekindling her love for Qasim. Both protagonists have faced instability—Qasim, growing up in war-torn Lebanon, and Dianna, in a military family from the American South. Our stories shape who we are. Can their love survive in a world that doesn’t support it? Their journey explores whether love can conquer war and heal a broken heart.
You can travel along with them, from Beirut to Nairobi, from New York to North Carolina.
A Thousand Flying Things is available online and at indie bookstores, and The Shores of Our Souls has a second edition coming out soon. You can get a taste of both characters on my website and Book Funnel.
I also host a podcast,”Humanity’s Greater Story,” spotlighting authors with transformative tales from around the world. A third book is in the works, chronicling my personal journey through loss, resilience, and unexpected love.
My latest speaking events include Rendezvous with a Writer (available online) and a live reading to a Virginia women’s group (March 2025). I will be speaking at my alma mater Hollins University in May 2025. The adventure continues—on the page and beyond.
What matters most to you?
I do my best to use my objectivity to tell a story that you can inhabit and feel, so that it becomes your story. I use my journalistic training, my creative writing experience, and my world view, including the Red Cross and Red Crescent principles to tell you any story. Above all, i want to communicate with as much neutrality, impartiality, and universality as possible. My coaching company is called Ground One because I believe that if we knew each other a little better, we’d realize how similar we are, even through our disagreements. Above all, I believe in unconditional love and peace, and I don’t think I’m naive to think they’re possible. We may be heading in the wrong direction, though, if we start blaming others for our problems instead of finding our own solutions.
These are other qualities I bring to everything I do:
Authenticity
Bravery
Objectivity
Truth Seeker
Inclusivity
Compassion
Kindness
Philosophical Curiosity
(My favorite word is “why”?)
Literary Activist (believe in the power of the written word to connect and transform
I’m human, of course, and make mistakes. I always strive to bring you the best most engaging stories I can. I hope you enjoy them as much as I enjoy writing them.
I am a regular donor to international organizations that help women and children survive, and ultimately, succeed. I am both a birth mother and an adoptive mother, and I can tell you that love is a tender thread that unites us all, no matter where we live or what we look like.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://kathrynbrownramsperger.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/kathyramsperger
- Facebook: https://facebook.com/kathyramsperger
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kathy-ramsperger-290a25/
- Twitter: https://X.com/kathyramspergr
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLejoLrTF4kWuxlsYddgiKg81q-O05xdJ2
- Other: https://tiktok.com/@kathyramsperger5
