It’s January 2015. Katie is a thirty-two-year-old adjunct professor, chronically underpaid, and now half a beat from homeless after running out on her long-term tech marketing partner. She washes up in a crumbling Silicon Valley apartment she can’t afford with a full course load to teach at her community college, a cranky orange cat, and an impending interview for a tenure-track position. Without that position, she’s as good as bankrupt and on a greyhound back east. But it’s handled, or so her mentor Maggie says. Maggie has been in the English Department for decades, and she knows how to pull hidden strings.
But then Maggie turns up dead in a parking garage, and before Katie can get too enveloped in grief, another body hits the ground—this time, the diversity representative on the hiring committee. Someone is targeting professors, and suddenly, chasing the once-in-a-lifetime tenure-track position means risking more than her rent, her career, and her ability to buy cat food. She may be lucky to get out of the interview alive.
Weaving through a tech-driven landscape of barely-functional scarcity and obscene plenty, REQUIRED MATERIALS follows Katie’s quest to net a steady gig, a reasonable place to live, and whoever took out her mentor. Not necessarily in that order.
*For loyal readers, REQUIRED MATERIALS is a literary mystery set on a community college campus that was serialized on Substack in a previous iteration. If you've hopped over here from there, welcome! The manuscript is currently going through what I dearly hope will be the final revision prior to the querying process.
Friday, March 28, 2025 at 11:26AM 