Born in Seattle but raised in Ithaca, New York, Kathy A. Zahler has come full circle, moving back to the Finger Lakes region in 1991, marrying her best friend's brother, and continuing to write without having to live across from Tompkins Square Park. Kathy's bread-and-butter is El-Hi textbooks, and on a typical day she may work both on kindergarten math and high school literature or on 10th grade social studies test prep and MCAT Verbal Reasoning. Kathy and her husband have a newish house they built from the ground up on 150 acres of fields and woods, where they raise chickens, peacocks, guinea fowl, pheasants, chocolate and yellow labs, turtles, fish, the occasional black bear visitor, and their teenage daughter, Olivia.