Katherine Karen Dunn (October 24, 1945 – May 11, 2016) was an American novelist, journalist, voice artist, radio personality, book reviewer, and poet from Portland, Oregon.

Her mother, Velma Golly, an artist from North Dakota, married a mechanic[2] or/and fisherman from the Pacific Northwest.

[3] She went to high school in Tigard, Oregon, and later attended Reed College in Portland on a full scholarship, but never graduated.

During a Christmas break trip to Ashbury Heights in 1967 she met a man she would spend the next ten years with.

After living for seven years at various locations, they returned to Portland to stay "because there was a good alternative public school", namely the Metropolitan Learning Center.

[2] Dunn waited tables in the morning before her son woke up, and tended bars at night, painted houses, and did voice-over work.

In the 1990s, Dunn wrote a regular column on boxing for PDXS , in which she at one time provided detailed criticism of Evander Holyfield's sportsmanship in his controversial fight with Mike Tyson.

[9] She won the Dorothea Lange—Paul Taylor Award in 2004 for her work on School of Hard Knocks: The Struggle for Survival in America's Toughest Boxing Gyms.

Dunn described her memory of when she began writing it in the late 1970s, walking to Portland's Washington Park Rose Garden, contemplating nature versus nurture and the genesis of the book with its publication in 1989.

An excerpt was published in the summer 2010 issue of The Paris Review[7] under the title "Rhonda Discovers Art".

It is about “a woman who has retreated into a life of isolation following a breakdown reflects on her time as an impoverished college student in the early 1970s in Portland, Oregon at the height of the women’s liberation movement, and the group of wealthy trust fund kids she befriends.”[16] It was rejected by other publishers in years following, and after 1979 she set the book aside.