Kathy Taylor is a writer, musician and a retired professor of Spanish (literature, linguistics, and creative writing). A passionate polyglot, she loves languages and their cultures and is fascinated by language in general. She has lived in Mexico, Nicaragua, Ireland, Curaçao and Germany, and has written and published in English, Spanish, Portuguese, German and Papiamentu: songs, poetry, short stories, essays, translations, a novel of literary fiction, a bilingual ethnographic novel on Mexican taxi drivers, and literary and linguistic theory.

 

Kathy’s writing often involves explorations of the natural world and the diverse communities that interact with it. Her short story collection Trees and Other Witnesses includes tales of childhood and imagination, migration and struggle, conflict and change. They take place in Mexico, Nicaragua and the U.S. It was a finalist for the Colorado Authors League award for mainstream / literary fiction. Kathy’s most recent publication, The Birthing House,is a novel of literary fiction about writing, memory and belonging. It takes place in the medieval fairytale town of Marburg, Germany, where Kathy and her family lived in the early 1980s. Layers of history and philosophy, stories of refugees and immigrants, midwives and births surround a woman who finds healing and self-discovery through her writing. The novel won an International Firebird Book Award for multicultural fiction. Kathy lives off the grid with her husband Peter in the mountains of Colorado.