Available Now. 

​WARD is a literary memoir that explores inheritance, secrets, memory, and the haunting legacies carried through women’s lives.

After discovering in adulthood that her mother was sold as a child and raised under a false identity, Kathleen Spada begins tracing a hidden family history shaped by abandonment, institutional power, and generational silence.

​As her mother slips deeper into dementia, Kathleen becomes the keeper of a story that was never meant to survive. Moving between investigation, memory, and haunting, WARD examines what it means to inherit histories that refuse to stay buried.

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The next reading / signing event will be in Springfield, Ohio.

Details soon! 

Praise for WARD...

Kathleen Spada weaves a haunting, lyrical memoir of secrets, mystery, and, ultimately, ​self-discovery. Through unforgettable characters and layered family histories, she traces the unseen currents that tether one generation to the next. An intimate meditation on identity and inheritance, this beautifully told story reveals how we come to understand our own lives, the people around us, and those who came before. As Spada notes, “I’ve done my best to listen.” 

~ Kristen Iversen
​Award-winning author of Full Body Burden: Growing Up in the Nuclear Shadow of Rocky Flats

Kathleen Spada’s WARD is an elegy and a eulogy with elements of an old-fashioned whodunit. In language that is both lyrical and precise, the author takes her readers on a journey to discover the secrets, the sorrows and joys of a long-lost loved one that is both spellbinding and heart-wrenching.

​~ Madeleine Blais
​Pulitzer-prize winning journalist and author

WARD is stylistically impressive and beautifully poetic. A compelling tale of a young woman who is ‘up against it.’ Spada evokes compassion and sympathy for her protagonist despite objectionable actions—a complicated girl overwhelmed by an environment, social and physical, few girls of her age and class could be expected to stand firm against.

 ~ Sterling Watson
Award-winning author of The Committee and Night Letter