About the Author and Artist

Author and artist Katherine Hitchcock lives in Seattle, Washington, and volunteers with the Seattle Giving Garden Network where gardeners grow and donate organic vegetables and herbs to the local food banks.

She had a 35-year career as a computer programmer for IBM in Silicon Valley which she documented in her book Atypical Girl Geek: A Memoir. While working for IBM, Katherine was an avid hiker, skier and backpacker. She spent many weekends in the Sierra Nevada and Yosemite and continues to find time for hiking and biking.

She helped raise her three step-children with her husband and their father, Edmund Downing. After the children were on their own, she and Edmund lived aboard their sailboat, S/V Volant, in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, where they telecommuted to their Silicon Valley jobs starting in 1995 – very early for telecommuting.

Over the next eight years they alternated work with extended time off to cruise the Caribbean and the Atlantic coast from Florida to Nova Scotia and back. In 2003 they shipped Volant to Seattle so they could be near family while Edmund battled cancer;  a battle he lost in 2005.

Katherine’s interest in watercolors began when she and Edmund moved aboard Volant. She took great joy in painting scenes that depicted their many travels. During their first cruise in the Bahamas, Katherine remembers waking up from a dream hearing “I want an art studio.” Thirty years later, in 2024, Katherine realized that dream by finding an art studio near her home in Seattle. She knew her first project would be to redraw and publish Star Children.