Kate Buckley developed a keen understanding of the problems and issues that adolescents face through teaching at-risk children in a Head Start program, facilitating support groups for adolescent girls, and working as a teen advocate in the Teen Abuse Prevention Project in Los Angeles public schools. Raising two adolescents of her own and helping them navigate through our complicated world gave her further insight into the challenges of the teen years. Living and working closely with youth inspired her to make a difference in their lives—to mentor them toward empowerment and, ultimately, to reach more of them through her writing.

Kate is a member of PEN USA, the Writers Guild, NOW, and AAUW. For PEN USA, the prestigious membership organization of "writers of every stripe working west of the Mississippi,” Kate has completed the first ever PEN in the Classroom (PITC) writing workshop in New Mexico. It was also the first time that PITC has been offered to middle school students. The eighth grade language arts teacher Buckley worked with said, “I’ve had kids tell me it was the most valuable help they’d gotten — ever.”

Kate received her BA in English and an MA in Human Development. In the 1990s, Kate worked as a screenwriter in Hollywood, developing and writing screenplays and teleplays. After moving to Santa Fe, New Mexico, she completed a Prevention Generalist training and coordinated a three-year, science-based drug and alcohol abuse prevention program in the public middle schools there.

An article Kate read in the LA Times about an anti-choice mother bringing her pregnant fifteen-year-old to an abortion clinic prompted her to write a teleplay treatment titled “Choices,” which the networks refused as “too controversial.” After holding the story idea in her head for many years and experiencing what was really happening in teens’ lives through her work in the schools, Kate decided to write it as a young adult novel, from the perspective of a teen girl.

Whether Kate is writing for them, raising them, or doing workshops and support groups with them, she is tuned in to the lived experience of today’s youth, and they respond powerfully to her and her work.

Kate Buckley lives and works in Santa Fe, New Mexico. www.katebuckleybooks.com

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