Katherine Ashenburg is the award-winning author of Going to Town: Architectural Walking Tours in Southern Ontario, The Mourner’s Dance: What We Do When People Die, and, most recently, The Dirt on Clean: An Unsanitized History. She writes a column on design and architecture for Toronto Life magazine and contributes regularly to the Sunday Travel section of The New York Times and to The Walrus. Quill & Quire says The Dirt on Clean “successfully lays bare the fact that our idea of cleanliness is a haphazard construction. By the end, you’ll look at your bathroom a little differently.”

Katherine has done in her career what many hope to: she has changed vocations, on average, once a decade. A PhD dissertation on Dickens and Christmas, a radio producer at the CBC, and the arts and books editor at The Globe and Mail, Katherine is now a freelance writer, lecturer, and teacher.

A self-described lapsed Dickensian who does not shower every day, Katherine lives in Toronto.