Thursday, June 18, 2026 | 7:00pm PT
The Transformative Power of Story
Katherine Center
Registration Now Open
Attendance is Complimentary. Registration is Required.
Best-selling novelist Katherine Center, author of The Love Haters, The Bodyguard, Things You Save in a Fire, How to Walk Away, and Happiness for Beginners, has built a career exploring resilience, love, and transformation through story. As a fiction writer, she works at the level where identity is formed: character, internal dialogue, belief, and turning point.
Through the disciplined craft of narrative, she studies how characters organize experience into meaning and how they construct a sense of self from memory, assumption, fear, and hope—and what changes when that internal story shifts.
In this Spark Salon, Center examines how the stories we live by shape who we become—not just the stories we read but the narratives we construct about failure, belonging, love, ambition, and possibility. She reflects on how narrative framing influences creativity and identity and how revising a story, on the page or in life, can expand what feels possible. Because fiction is not an escape. It is a laboratory for transformation.
6:00 p.m.: Doors open, reception
7:00 p.m.: Program begins promptly
8:00 p.m.: Book signing and reception
In-person attendees will receive a complimentary copy of The Shippers, releasing May 19.
Bio
BookPage calls Katherine Center “the reigning queen of comfort reads.” She’s the New York Times best-selling author of over half a dozen books, including How to Walk Away, Things You Save in a Fire, and What You Wish For. Katherine writes laugh-and-cry books about how life knocks us down—and how we get back up. She’s been compared to both Jane Austen and Nora Ephron, and The Dallas Morning News calls her stories “satisfying in the most soul-nourishing way.” Her books have made countless best-of lists, including Real Simple’s Best Books of 2020, Amazon's Top 100 Books of 2019, Goodreads' Best Books of the Year, and many more. Best-selling author Emily Henry calls her summer 2022 book The Bodyguard “a shot of pure joy.” The movie adaptation of Katherine’s novel The Lost Husband (starring Josh Duhamel) hit #1 on Netflix, and her novel Happiness for Beginners was produced as a Netflix original starring Ellie Kemper. Katherine lives in her hometown of Houston, Texas, with her husband, their two kids, and their fluffy-but-fierce dog.
