About Kim

As an only child growing up in a small town in North Carolina, novels opened up the world for me. Inside books I found ready companions who could keep up with my interests and imagination. I also loved to write. In fact, I still remember the plot and concluding sentence of a story I wrote in third grade.

This is a picture of me my mother put in the newspaper when I turned six. My hair was so long I could actually sit on it if I tipped my head back just a bit!

I was crazy in love with horses. By the time I started weekly riding lessons, I had read all the horse books in our public library and memorized the entire anatomy of the horse – from muzzle to hock and everything in between.

This is a picture of me riding my first really good horse, a 3-gaited mare named Truly Fair. By the time I left for Wake Forest University, she was a brood mare and I was the proud owner of her first colt, Bandit.

Though I loved English and writing, I ended up majoring in Economics, it seemed more practical I think. Then on a Friday the 13th of my senior year, I met the very cute guy who would become my husband. If you want to read more about that click here for an essay I wrote this Valentine’s Day for the WFU alumni website.

After working in New York for a couple of years, we moved to Atlanta and I received my MBA from Emory University. Something about being married must have made me smarter, or at least more focused, because I graduated first in my class. Definitely a first for me! I worked as an equity analyst and wrote lots of reports on stocks for what is now Bank of America, and completed the three years of exams necessary to receive my CFA (Chartered Financial Analyst) designation.

But when I had children (aren’t they cute?) I happily moved out of the realm of economics and finance, and squarely back into the land of books. From Goodnight Moon, to The Giver, and beyond, I cherished instilling a love of books in my children and their classmates. We went out at midnight for the Harry Potter book releases, often in costume, I read to the first graders, volunteered in the school library, and promoted our book fair.

But I also really wanted to write.

That desire led me to author A Clearing in the Forest, first in the Journeys from Ayrden series. It’s got a touch of my all time favorite book, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis in it, a smidgen of all those horse books I read in the Asheboro library, and a love story. My maiden name was Love, so a bit of romance is sort of a given with me. You can read more about the book and me in an article published by my hometown newspaper, The Courier-Tribune, here.

I live in Charlotte, NC – which is a lot bigger than the town I grew up in – with my husband – the cute guy mentioned above. Now it’s not just books that open up the world to me, it’s airplanes too, as I travel often. But whether I am at home or away, you’ll now find me doing what I have always loved best – reading and writing.

I hope you’ll read A Clearing in the Forest, and if you do, please let me know how you like it! You can send me an email or let me know via Facebook, Tumblr, Instagram, or Twitter.