Image of the Lake Michigan shore on a stormy day. Waves crash onto the shore.

Katie Prout is a features writer for the Chicago Reader. She received her BA from Kalamazoo College, her MFA in Nonfiction from the University of Iowa, and now lives in Chicago. Besides the Reader, her work has been featured in Literary Hub, The New Republic, Longreads, and elsewhere.

In 2020, Katie’s profile of Chicago blues artist Mary Lane was anthologized in Dispatches from the Rust Belt: Volume III, and in 2023, her reported essay on her struggle to find a psychiatrist who accepts Medicaid was included in the anthology Going for Broke: Living on the Edge in the World’s Richest Country.

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