Kara Dalkey
Kara Dalkey was born in 1953 in Los Angeles, California.
The hospital she was born in is now a set of expensive condominiums,
which only proves you can never go home again. She has spent her life
trying to figure out what she is going to do when she grows up. Given
her vertically challenged nature, this is likely to be a neverending
quest. She studied Anthropology at the University of California at Los
Angeles, and fashion design at the Fashion Institute of Design &
Merchandising. This did not, however, lead to a lucrative career in
designing beaded neck rings for some aboriginal tribe.
Kara moved to Minneapolis in 1977, where she played
electric bass guitar and sang in a few deservedly obscure pop/folk
bands, and wrote scripts for and performed in radio drama for the SF
radio show Shockwave. To keep the wolf from the door, she variously
sorted photographs, made rubber stamps and did word processing for an
insurance brokerage. Then some friends invited her into their writers
group, The Scribblies, and Kara discovered that she could write. And
get what she wrote published. And the rest, as they say...well, no,
they don't, actually.
Kara has twelve published novels, as well as several short
stories. Many are set in Heian Japan (700-1100 AD), an era that
produced many women writers, which is why she found it fascinating.
She also has set novels in Mogul India, as well as modern Pittsburgh and
Colorado. She has written Young Adult novels, as well as those for the
general fantasy reader, and her novel LITTLE SISTER won the Utah
Children's Book Award for best Young Adult Book of 1999-2000.
Her hobbies vary widely depending on what year you ask her.
In the past, they have included SF fandom, skydiving, Shotokan Karate,
Tae-kwon-do, skiing, hiking, improv comedy, watercolor painting, bird
watching, and community theatre acting. This past year it's been back
to playing electric bass and singing in obscure bands, computer games,
and gardening. Although she has spent the last seven years living in
an obscure little town in the Colorado Rockies, at the moment her life
is in flux By summer 2001, she will undoubtedly be somewhere else and
Everything Will Be Completely Different.
Her latest novel on the stands is GENPEI, another historical
fantasy, concerning the civil wars that ended the Heian period. She is
currently working on a Young Adult fantasy trilogy for Harper Collins
that combine in a blender the Atlantis and Arthurian legends--those
books should be out in Spring of 2002.
Her latest short story published is "Bouncing Babies", in
the SF anthology Not Of Woman Born, which is curiously showing up as
required reading in university lectures about reproductive technology.
Kara finds this pleasantly baffling. She has just sold a short story
entitled "Lady of the Ice Garden" to an anthology to be published by
Puffin Books in 2003.
Books:
Genpei (2001)
Crystal Sage (1999)
Steel Rose (1998)
Author's Homepage:
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