Katharine Pearson Criss, who was instrumental in starting the Center for Rural Strategies and the Daily Yonder, died January 2, 2026. She was 79.
At the time of her death from natural causes, Katharine was in Kenya with her son, Rand, daughter-in-law, Sapna, and her granddaughter, Radha.
Katharine was on the first board of directors of the Center for Rural Strategies, which formed in 2001. She left the board to become a vice president of the organization, leading both the international community philanthropy work (which produced the book and documentary “Donors Ourselves”) and the Rural Assembly. When she retired from Rural Strategies, she became a Rural Strategies senior fellow.
I met Katharine in the 1970s when she was an actress/executive director of the Play Group in Knoxville. In addition to serious drama, the troupe had a great routine where they put a box of old clothes on stage, pulled out random hats, jackets, accessories, and would improvise an array of characters: rednecks, sassy teens, back-talking shopkeepers, women who’d seen enough. They could do it for school children or lubricated party goers, and it was always entertaining.
Katharine succeeded me as president of Appalshop, the Appalachian media and culture center, and from Appalshop she went to act again at Lime Kiln Theater in Lexington, Virginia. Katharine returned to Knoxville to start the East Tennessee Foundation in 1986, and in light of success there, the Ford Foundation made her Representative of their East Africa office in Nairobi in 1994. Because she was skilled in front of crowds, the foundation also asked her to emcee their internal international gatherings.
In 2000, our group of schemers here in Whitesburg had completed the plan for what we were then calling the Rural Media Center. Katharine was in from Kenya for a visit to Knoxville. She agreed to read our proposal and subsequently took it back to New York and passed it around the Ford Foundation. She advocated for us. Maybe a week later, the rural program officer at Ford, who was then Mil Duncan, suggested a name change, but offered us $500,000 to start the organization.
Katharine was fierce, and she was funny. She had an eye for irony, even when she was living it. She instituted a no alcohol policy in the building at Appalshop, but you could always get a drink in her office. She was a great cusser. She’d call sellouts “whorebags.” But in the Knoxville office of Rural Strategies, she came up with the swear jar, where employees were fined for bad words. Once on a miserable, windy, slushy night in New York City, Katharine and I were waiting in a long hotel taxi line, freezing. Some woman in a fur jumped the line to take the cab as it was discharging a passenger. Katharine stepped out and yelled, “Hey.” The woman in the fur looked at Katharine and caught a stare that would buckle most mortals. The woman quivered, said sorry, and slouched back into the hotel. I looked at Katharine in total amazement. It was like seeing the rock of ages. She said, “I know, I know.”
In our time together at Rural Strategies and at Appalshop, Katharine and I often disagreed about priorities and how the organizations should be run. Our styles clashed. We had epic arguments. Younger staff would run for cover. Still, there was never a question that she cared about our mission and that she wanted us to do great things in the world. And she accomplished notable feats in Appalachia, in East Africa, and beyond. I got a call from an old friend telling me what a shadow Katharine cast and how many people she helped in the community philanthropy field.
Maybe because Katharine and I got through our fights, we stayed good friends. My last full day with KP was after she got sick. We sat in her back yard beside the Holston River and watched songbirds and magpies dive for suet. Listened to them sing and chatter. She was struggling with language, so mostly we just sat there, pointing. Talk is overrated. I loved Katharine. I will miss her. May her memory be a blessing.
Dee Davis is president of the Center for Rural Strategies and publisher of the Daily Yonder.
The post Remembrance: Katharine Pearson Criss (1948-2026) appeared first on The Daily Yonder.
