Kathleen Finneran

Kathleen Finneran (born December 3, 1957, in St. Louis, Missouri) was an American memoirist best known for her book-length family memoir The Tender Land: A Family Love Story (2000), which chronicles her Irish Catholic family's life and the suicide of her younger brother Sean. She received a Whiting Award in 2001, a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2003, and taught creative nonfiction at Washington University in St. Louis, where she helped establish the department's creative nonfiction track as senior writer-in-residence. Finneran died peacefully in her sleep on February 14, 2026, at age 68.