Kennedy Foster was born in Detroit in 1944 and raised in the Army.  Her father was a career officer, so she ‘followed the gun’ to Germany, to Virginia, to California, to Washington DC, to Kansas, to Alaska, back to Kansas, to Pennsylvania, back to DC, and back to Germany.  She attended six elementary schools, three high schools, and two colleges, finishing her BA at Grinnell College in 1966.  She wrote poetry and short stories, which were published in school literary magazines and made her mother proud but did not otherwise attract attention.

She married a Grinnell professor, who turned out to be the right stuff.  Because academics were extremely peripatetic in those years, the family traveled a lot, from Iowa (where her sons John and James were born), to California, to Maryland, and finally to southeastern Washington state.  During this period, she “rode a lot of borrowed horses, and wrote in borrowed styles,” having developed a transient’s habit of re-inventing herself in each new place. 

In the Northwest she struck root, a delightful sensation.  She gave up fiction, took writing jobs of various kinds, grants, financial development boilerplate, newsletters.  At 45, she discovered a vocation to teach. She has taught English as a second language, basic writing, and basic college skills at Walla Walla Community College since 1988.

About the writing of her first novel, she says, “We had a sabbatical in Scotland, up in the north, Aberdeenshire.  Six months in a bed-sit, freezing blast off the North Sea, dawn at nine, dark at three, no job, no acquaintance, and my life’s companion in the library from breakfast to teatime. So I had to write the book.  I felt like the dog in the Faulkner story who knew if she were going to keep on calling herself a hound, she would have to tackle the bear.”

Kennedy Foster lives in Walla Walla with her husband Edward, an indeterminate number of cats, and not nearly enough horses.