KC Wildmoon

Interview by Gail Reeder

KC Wildmoon was born in a valley in East Tennessee, so she’s an actual bonafide hillbilly, unlike the current vice president of these United States, who at best could be described as a shillbilly. KC graduated high school 51 years ago (in 1974) and briefly attended college, studying accounting, of all things. But accounting was super boring, so she ran away to Atlanta, Georgia to play music, because that was something she could do. Her musical talent was something she inherited from her dad, who was a mechanic, a school bus driver, and a bluegrass bass player. 

KC did fine with music, but she sucked at self-promotion, so she just couldn’t get any traction except in small venues with small players. But that was fine. Somewhere in the course of stumbling around in the big city, she realized everyone she knew was a lesbian and, being good at patterns, thought, ah ha! And that was that. 

She wrote a little here and there, played some music, made pizzas at a pizza joint, and eventually hooked up with several other lesbians in a band called Anima Rising, one of the first all lesbian bands in the Atlanta. Later KC joined with Atlanta actor Grace MacEachron and “Other Harmonies,” a production of women artists. She met several more incredible performers, including Jan Gibson. And that was the beginning of the band Moral Hazard.

Moral Hazard had a song celebrating its members, each verse saying something cool about their birth, their life. KC’s had a line about her relationship with her mother, which was … um … problematic. That line, “wild moon of her mother’s sun sign,” was about KC’s astrological moon sign – Gemini – being the same as her mother’s astrological sun sign. Since everybody was already calling her KC, “Wildmoon” became her surname.

KC eventually-joined the improv theatre group, ACME Theatre. She’s been known to rejoin members of the troupe for special performances, particularly their Very Great Poets series.

Somewhere in all this, KC was doing a radio show on WRFG called “Still Ain’t Satisfied.” Chris Cash, the editor of Southern Voice, asked if she’d be interested in writing music reviews for the paper. That turned into theatre reviews, which became irreverent opinion pieces. One day, some news broke when KC was the only person in the office so she became a reporter. Things changed that day, because being a reporter was amazing.

After leaving Southern Voice, KC spent 16 years at CNN, then spent a few years with Storyful, the world’s first social media fact-checking news agency based in Ireland. For the last few years, she’s been deputy editor of CrimeOnline for Nancy Grace. 

There was a time when KC was gonna move back to Tennessee to restore a 240-year-old historic log cabin that had been in her family for 80 years. But Tennessee turned into one of the dumbest states in the union and she couldn’t bear the thought of actually living amongst troglodytes again. Reluctantly, she sold the property, and still cries about it near every day.

These days, KC is owned by cats, currently just the one, and is plotting an escape from the confederacy to some place closer to Canada. She still writes, and if you ask nice, she’ll tell you where.