Catherine Pelonero

About Catherine Pelonero

Catherine Pelonero's plays include Family Names and Awesome Ghosts of Ontario, both published by Samuel French, Inc. She has won the Off-Off Broadway Short Play Festival and the Yale University Screenwriting Competition for her short screenplay, Preservation Society. Other titles include Puppies with Papers, a finalist for the Heideman Award at Actors Theatre of Louisville, and Another Effing Family Drama, which premiered at the 2011 Hollywood Fringe Festival and was chosen for Best of the Fringe.

Catherine Pelonero is the author of Kitty Genovese: A True Account of a Public Murder and its Private Consequences, a nonfiction book about the notorious 1964 murder case. Kitty Genovese made both the New York Times and Amazon bestseller lists, reaching #10 on the New York Times Best Sellers in crime & punishment and #1 on Amazon in biography & memoir, Kindle edition. Her most recent book, Absolute Madness: A True Story of a Serial Killer, Race, and a City Divided, was published in November 2017.

As a true crime author and commentator, Catherine has appeared on episodes of the Emmy-winning series A Crime to Remember on Investigation Discovery, It Takes a Killer, Fox Files, and Murderous Affairs as well as on several national news programs. She is a contributing writer for CrimeFeed.

Catherine Pelonero is originally from Buffalo, New York, where she studied playwriting with Emanuel Fried. She is a member the Actors Studio Playwrights & Directors Unit, Sisters in Crime, and a former vice chair of the Alliance of Los Angeles Playwrights. She lives in Los Angeles.