Kathy Beckwith

Author Kathy Beckwith grew up on an Oregon farm. After college, she and her husband Wayne went to India with the Peace Corps to work in village horticulture. Later, a boarding school in South India became home to their family. Back in the U.S., Kathy became a community mediator, a mediation trainer and school mediation coach, a work she has done both in India and in Oregon. Their “family sabbatical” tradition has taken them back to “their school” and always back to their Peace Corps village in Karnataka. Like Annie in Kathy's latest young adult novel ENCOUNTER, after discovering another meaning for “Animator,” Kathy says, “That’s what I hope to be when I really grow up.”

Kathy is a graduate of Northwest Nazarene University, Nampa, Idaho (Business Administration), and did a semester of advanced study with the University of the Seven Seas (now “Semester at Sea”). She is a mom and grandma, and a picker of blackberries and baker of berry pies in the summer. She loves to look for "singing places" (which she always tries out), and likes walking on the country road near their home.