Kathleen Rooney was born in Beckley, West Virginia and raised in the Midwest. Along with Abby Beckel, she is a founding editor of Rose Metal Press. Her first book, Reading with Oprah: the Book Club That Changed America (University of Arkansas, 2005), is now available in paperback with new material. Her second book, That Tiny Insane Voluptuousness, poetry collaborations with Elisa Gabbert, was published by Otoliths in Spring 2008. Her solo poetry collection, Oneiromance (an epithalamion), won the 2007 Gatewood Prize from Switchback Books, and her occupational memoir, Live Nude Girl: My Life as an Object was published by University of Arkansas Press in 2009. The essay from which it originated appears in Twentysomething Essays by Twentysomething Writers (Random House, 2006).

A 2003 recipient of a Ruth Lilly Fellowship from Poetry magazine, her poems and collaborations have appeared in a variety of journals, as have her essays and criticism. She has taught English and Creative Writing at Emerson College, Northeastern University, Grub Street, the Boston Center for Adult Education, and Pacific Lutheran University. She lives in Chicago with her husband, the writer Martin Seay.