Kristin DeMarco Wagner has been published at Full Grown People, Rooted in Rights, The Manifest-Station, and The Rumpus among other online literary magazines. Her essay for The Rumpus, “Finding Shelter”, won in the Editor’s Choice and Essay categories of Beyond Your Blog’s Hall of Fame in June of 2017. She has a memoir-in-essays manuscript about parenting with chronic illness, and is currently working on a historical YA set in 1500s Venice. Her newest essay is in The Fourth River, the literary magazine of Chatham University in Pittsburgh. The flash non-fiction piece “Petechiae” is in their Spring 2024 print edition, an anthology called Disability: Visible and Invisible.

Kristin began writing about as soon as she could spell (a critique of Michael J. Fox’s classic Teen Wolf in a little pink notebook can be found in the archives, and is considered a foundational piece). Essays about her two children came a while after that, and pieces about chronic illness after that. She was a high school English teacher in a former life.

A lot of her non-writing time is spent managing hypermobility (likely Ehlers-Danlos), POTs (still in the unofficial category, but VERY sure this is going to be official any day now), MCAS (same story here) and you know, a bevy of other chronic illnesses and autoimmune diseases (fibro, Hashimoto’s, the aftermath of Lyme and Babesia). It’s alot, for sure. Oh, and you know managing three or four different aspects of her own neurodivergence-AuDHD people, if you know you know! We’re finding out every day how interconnected neurodivergence and atypical body systems are. The Lyme (contracted about the same time as she was closely studying Teen Wolf) was just bad luck.

Parenting time is mainly spent in the high school auditorium these days: bringing gluten-free dinners during tech week, buying flowers for whoever is performing on any given night, getting inspired by how integral and important all the performing arts are and how passionate teenagers can be about creating magic. Free time (lol) is finally getting into Only Murders in the Building, which is a freaking delight.

You can connect with Kristin through e-mail at kristindemarcowagner@gmail.com, on Instagram @kristindemarcowagner or on BlueSky @kcdemarcowagner.