Sammamish author pens novel based on experiences with the foster system
Sammamish author Quinn Kulas has released her debut novel, The Contest, which follows Iris Harden, a young woman aging out of the foster system on her 18th birthday.
The story takes readers through a difficult and emotionally layered journey of Iris fighting not only to gain a new life in the face of near death, but to keep that life after her ordeals.
Kulas wrote the novel partly based on her own experiences working with children in the foster care system.
The author’s relationship with writing began early. As a child, she would sit at her mother’s typewriter, pressing keys until the carriage dinged, and then stapling the pages together into tiny books she considered her own. She later studied English and creative writing in college, always finding that when something truly mattered to her, she reached for words to make sense of it.
That instinct deepened while working at a youth group home during college, where she encountered children whose lives looked drastically different from her own.
“You have a fairly normal upbringing, and then you see how different things are for kids thrown into the foster system,” Kulas said.
That experience stayed with her long after college and ultimately redirected her career. Kulas attended law school with the specific goal of representing children in California dependency court, where every child in foster care is assigned an attorney. She later practiced juvenile law in Florida before relocating to Sammamish, where she passed the Washington Bar Exam last year and is now pursuing similar work again.
Over the years, the people she met quietly shaped the emotional core of The Contest. The resilience she witnessed from foster kids, the variety of circumstances that brought children into courtrooms, and the way many of them kept pushing forward despite it all became part of the story she had wanted to write for years.
Her writing process happened gradually across roughly three years, often in fragments squeezed between work and family life. National Novel Writing Month helped spark the first draft, while a writing group at Sammamish Library provided the structure that kept the project moving.
“If I could just sit down and write, I don’t think I’d ever run out of ideas,” Kulas said. “There’s just no time.”
Her pen name, “Quinn Kulas,” also carries personal meaning. “Quinn” is her daughter’s middle name, while “Kulas” comes from her maternal grandmother’s maiden name. The choice reflects the kind of stories she intends to continue telling—centered on women and girls navigating adversity, not necessarily through dramatic heroics, but through endurance and perseverance.
“It doesn’t have to be that you do something amazing,” she said. “It can just be that you persevere and get somewhere better.”
She uses a pen name purely out of practicality though, ensuring that her other identity as a lawyer does not collide with being an author and being able to write through a new lens.
Two additional novels are already underway, each intended to carry that same spirit forward.
For readers who see parts of themselves in Iris’s story, Kulas hopes the message is simple.
“That they’re not alone,” she said. “That people know they exist.”
