Kathryn Canavan became a first-time author at 65.

It is natural that she write about the Lincoln Assassination and America’s first kidnapping because Canavan began her journalism career as a crime reporter.

To get a story, she has reported at gunpoint, lived with the Moonies, negotiated with a killer and joined Tug McGraw in the Phillies dugout.

She worked as reporter or editor in four states, but she left full-time newsroom to serve as a partially paralyzed parent Her freelance writing has been published in USA Today, the Philadelphia Inquirer, The Daily Beast, Prevention magazine and the History News Network.

She is the author of Lincoln’s Final Hours from University Press of Kentucky and True Crime Philadelphia from Lyons Press. Her upcoming book is about a 1976 spree murder. Her research included interviews with survivors, detectives, attorneys and others in 1976 and in 2023.

She has appeared as a Lincoln scholar on Discovery Channel, PBS and C-Span. She lectured at the Lincoln Group of the District of Columbia, at John Wilkes Booth’s boyhood home in Bel Air, Md., and at the Lincoln Home Historical Site in Springfield, Ill.

She was named a National Health Journalism Fellow at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School of Communications and Journalism in 2011. Her fellowship project, “No Child Allowed Outside,” chronicled the health effects of gun violence on young children.

She is a former dinosaur docent at the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia and former long-time volunteer with Cub Pack 506, the nation’s first Cub Scout pack exclusively for boys living in shelters or on the streets.