Women's History Month Highlight - K. Ancrum
We’re excited to continue to highlight some of the women who have influenced change, creatively contributed, and inspired us all for Women’s History Month.
Today we’re proud to highlight K. Ancrum, the author of the upcoming Lethal Lit novel MURDER OF CROWS from Einhorn’s Epic Productions and Scholastic. K. is the award winning thriller THE WICKER KING, lesbian romance THE WEIGHT OF THE STARS and the Peter Pan thriller DARLING. She is a Chicago native passionate about diversity and representation in young adult fiction.
Lethal Lit is the story of young sleuth and investigator Tig Torres, who returns to her hometown of Hollow Falls to hunt down the Lit Killer, a gruesome serial killer who staged victims according to scenes in classic literature. MURDER OF CROWS picks up after Lethal Lit season one and follows Tig as she has to solve a new mystery. Continue reading below for more about K. and her work!
EEP: What is your favorite character in EEP’s slate? What’s your favorite character elsewhere?
K. Ancrum: I adore Wyn from Lethal Lit. She’s exactly the type of girl I would have been friends with in high school. Brash, sweet, a bit alternative and knows herself through and through.
I adore Wyn from Lethal Lit. She’s exactly the type of girl I would have been friends with in high school. Brash, sweet, a bit alternative and knows herself through and through.
– K. Ancrum
My favorite woman character of all time is Ellen Ripley from the Alien franchise. She’s an incredible example of a woman given the shortest stick imaginable, but wielding it like a sword to save her own life.
EEP: What woman in history do you look up to?
KA: Eartha Kitt. She was ruthless, tender and bold. Her entire body of work is incredible and she’s the highlight of all of it. If you’re unfamiliar with her she played Yzma in the Emperor’s New Groove and sang the song Santa Baby, among other things.
There is a video from when she was younger where an interviewer asks her if she would “compromise her life for a man” and she really lets him have it. I highly recommend looking it up!
EEP: What’s your latest project?
KA: I’m working on a girl-gang train heist book for Macmillan right now. It’s a story about a group of friends from a poor town who plan to rob a train to help pay for epilepsy treatment for the leader’s boyfriend. But when they manage to get on the train they learn its already being robbed by violent professional adults and the new goal is to escape with their lives.
EEP: What advice do you wish you received when you were starting out?
KA: I wish someone had told me to hyperfocus on a specific genre. I’m a fun author to follow because my books hop from genre to genre with the main commonality between them being queer ensemble casts, strong generational familial relationships and trauma processing. But I do think some professional mentorship would have lead me towards building my roots in a single genre, as opposed to having to begin doing that 3 books into my career.
EEP: What was one of the toughest creative or professional challenges you had to face? How did you overcome it?
KA: I have a lot of difficulty with writing traditional formats. I have ADHD and the way my brain processes long chunks of information, and books in general is bit different. It comes more naturally to me, as a neurodivergent person, write extremely minimalist vignettes, almost like poetry. When I was first starting out, a professor told me that I had to prepare to jump from my preferred format to traditional format or I wouldn’t be able to write professionally. But instead, I just tightened my skill in my own format until it was so good that none of that mattered. Fun Twist: I do have two traditional formatted books coming out soon! (DARLING 06/21/2021 and MURDER OF CROWS 11/02/2021.)
EEP: What’s your superpower?
KA: Speed writing. I am a beast at speedwriting to the point where I have to dial things back to maintain my health. Earlier this year I wrote so fast that I got calluses on the joints of my fingers from sheer friction from typing. My second book, The Weight of the Stars was written in a single month.
