Katherine A Smith

Katherine A Smith grew up on the Mendocino Coast in California, USA. As a child, her pastimes 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, only leaving to go to college.

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, and performed 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 theater tech.

After college, she lived for two years in the San Francisco bay area before returning to school. She graduated 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 SF Bay Area, where she worked for two years, before being laid-off in the Great Recession. She returned to school yet again, and completed an intense one-year course in the Japanese language at Cornell University. She then went to live and work in Japan. In 2013, Katherine returned to the US and now lives in the Santa Cruz area. She has been working on new fantasy-adventure books, children's books, and other hobbies.