Katherine A Smith was born in 1980. She grew up on the Mendocino Coast in California, USA. As a child, her pasttimes were art, writing, playing with both toy cars and toy horses, building models, and exploring the Jackson State Forest. In school she was a good student. She briefly played basketball, but devoted most of her energy to martial arts, particularly the style of American Parker Kenpo. She trained for ten years and was also an instructor for kids classes, only leaving to go to college in 1998. Katherine attended college for four years, and spent a fifth year on exchange. She graduated summa cum laude with a degree in Zoology. During college, without a martial arts studio to train at, she switched to dance, learning ballet, jazz, modern, and post-modern, and danced in a number of shows, including with the Blau Rhino Dance Company. She also performed as an actor and actor-dancer-singer, and worked behind the scenes as a tech. After college, she lived for two years in the San Francisco bay area: working, dancing, and teching theater shows, before returning to school. She graduated in 2006 with a Graduate Certificate in Scientific Illustration from the University of California Santa Cruz. The next year she spent as a graphic designer and illustrator for the Cornell Lab of Ornithology in Ithaca, New York, and then returned to the San Francisco Bay Area, where she worked for two years, before being laid-off in the Recession along with many others. She returned to school yet again. She completed an intense one-year course in the Japanese language at Cornell University, and went to live and work in Japan from 2010 to 2013. In 2013, Katherine returned to the US. She now lives again in the San Francisco bay area. She continues to work on her fantasy-adventure novels, and has also begun creating children's books. Katherine has always enjoyed art and writing. Above all, she likes making up and telling stories: via words, drawings, dance, song, or stagecraft; the telling of a story is the motivating force. Whenever possible, she backs up her fantasy with science, to enhance the believability of her creations.
