About the Author-Illustrator

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, as needed.

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 along with many others. Since then, she has 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 starting in the fall of 2010.

In 2013, Katherine completed her experience teaching in Japan and returned to the US. She now lives again in the San Francisco bay area. She has been working on her second series of fantasy-adventure books, children's books, and toying with ideas for a video game and board game and a stage play/musical, among other hobbies.

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.

For her art and design, Katherine likes to work in the following mediums:
Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, acrylic, pen and ink, graphite, and scratchboard

More information about Katherine can be found on the FAQ page.

Thank you for your interest!

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