Katie Rose Guest Pryal
Adjunct Professor of Law

Areas of Expertise
- Disability Law
- Legal Writing
Biography
Katie Rose Guest Pryal, J.D., Ph.D., joined the Carolina Law faculty in 2009 as an adjunct in legal writing; shortly thereafter she joined the legal writing faculty in a full-time position. She left the faculty to pursue a full-time writing career in 2014. She was delighted to rejoin the faculty as an adjunct in 2019 to teach Writing for the Bar, an upper-level legal writing course she helped design. A specialist in legal writing, she’s written many textbooks on law and writing, including Core Grammar for Lawyers (4th ed. 2020, with Ruth Ann McKinney), The Complete Legal Writer (2d ed. 2020, with Alexa Z. Chew), and the Complete Bar Writer (2020, with Alexa Z. Chew). Dr. Pryal is an award-winning author and frequent keynote speaker. She is the author of Life of the Mind Interrupted: Essays on Mental Health and Disability in Higher Education (2017), #1 Amazon bestseller; The Freelance Academic: Transform Your Creative Life and Career (2019), winner of a Gold INDIE award; and Even If You’re Broken: Essays on Sexual Assault and #MeToo (2019), winner of a Gold IPPY award. She’s also written three novels, Entanglement, Chasing Chaos, and Fallout Girl. She is a columnist for Women in Higher Education, where she covers gender issues, labor, and academia. Her popular column for Catapult magazine, “Mom, Interrupted,” is about family life, mental illness, and raising disabled kids as a disabled parent. Her column “Public Writing Life” for the Chronicle of Higher Education advises academics who wish to transition to writing for public audiences. She speaks frequently about mental health and disability, writing and publishing, gender issues, and higher education.
Education
- 1998, Duke University, AB French and English, cum laude
- 2000, John Hopkins University Writing Seminars, MA Creative Writing
- 2003, UNC School of Law, JD
- 2007, UNC-Greensboro, Ph.D. Rhetoric and Composition and Certificate in Women's Studies
Selected Publications
THE COMPLETE BAR WRITER (A. Chew & K. Pryal) (Carolina Acad. Press, 2020).
KF303 .C44 2020
Reframing Sanity: Scapegoating the Mentally Ill in the Case of Jared Loughner,
in RE/FRAMING IDENTIFICATIONS 159 (Michelle Baliff, ed.) (Waveland Press, 2013).
SSRN
The Genre Discovery Approach: Preparing Law Students to Write Any Legal Document, 59 WAYNE L. REV. 351 (2013).
Westlaw | Lexis/Nexis | SSRN | Hein
Hollywood's White Legal Heroes and the Legacy of Slave Codes, in AFTERIMAGES OF SLAVERY: ESSAYS ON APPERANCES IN RECENT AMERICAN FILMS, LITERATURE, TELEVISION AND OTHER MEDIA 145 (M. Allen and S. D. Williams, eds.) (McFarland Press, 2012).
SSRN | PS374.S58 A38 2012
The Genre of the Mood Memoir and the Ethos of Psychiatric Disability, in NEURORHETORICS 105 (Jordynn Jack, ed.) (Routledge 2013) (originally published in RHETORIC SOCIETY QUARTERLY).
SSRN | P301.5.S63 N58 2013
The Creativity Mystique and the Rhetoric of Mood Disorders, 31:3 DISABILITY STUD. Q. (2011).
SSRN | Document Link
The Genre of the Mood Memoir and the Ethos of Psychiatric Disability, 40 RHETORIC SOC'Y Q. 479 (2010).
SSRN
In the Media
- Pryal: The Holes We Live With (Full Grown People)
- Pryal: Public Writing in Uncertain Times (Chronicle of Higher Education)
- Pryal: Letting Go of Rigor Anxiety During a Pandemic (National Teaching & Learning Forum)
- Pryal: The Public Writing Life: The Venue, the Pitch, and the Fee (Chronicle of Higher Education)
- Pryal: You Want to Write for the Public, but About What? (Chronicle of Higher Education)
- Pryal: No, I Don’t Want Your Advice on How My Kids or I Can Be “Cured” (Catapult)
- Pryal: 10 Questions Every Academic Should Ask Before Writing for the Public (Chronicle of Higher Education)
- Pryal: What Do Psychiatrically Disabled Faculty Owe Our Students? (Vitae)
- Pryal: The Worst Part of the Bar Exam: It’s Time to Drop the Mental Health Questions (Slate)
- Pryal: Shattering the Madness Monolith: On the Intersections of Race, Gender, and Psychiatric Disability (Vitae)