Born in Manhattan Beach, California, Kathy Grossman is a writer, teacher, musician, and artist. After getting a degree in English at University of California Santa Barbara, she took over 40 hours of education and child development courses at six different colleges, and in 2008 she earned a Master of Professional Communication, concentrating on technical writing, at Westminster College. Kathy has lived in California (23 years), Illinois (3), New York (1/2), New Mexico (11), Ohio (3), Texas (4), Alaska (2), Nova Scotia (2), Pennsylvania (4), the United Arab Emirates (1), and Utah (9). Her father was a trumpet player, pianist, composer, and movie maker (his claim to fame was his work on “Tubby the Tuba.”) Her mother was a singer, pianist, clarinetist, dancer, and junior high school teacher.
The oldest of three and the product of a fabulously musical family, Kathy has sung in the church choir, college folk duos and trios, Country Rye country western group, and performed original folk and country western material in Cincinnati and Albuquerque. A glorious spurt of songwriting during four months in 1976 in Brooklyn, New York, produced over 30 country-western songs, many of which appear in the “Song Lyrics” section of this site.
Kathy worked as a substitute and classroom teacher in Ohio and New Mexico before having children. She met Tom while teaching first and second grades in Albuquerque, and they married in 1981 in Sedona, Arizona. They homeschooled their sons for eight years before sending the the two older boys to public schools in Canada, and then all three to public schools when they moved back to the US. She and Tom lived in 16 residences during their life together. While living just below the Arctic Circle, Kathy wrote a column “At Home in Nome” for the weekly newspaper The Nome Nugget. Those Nome Nugget essays are now being revised and compiled for a new book. Her daily blogs while living in Paris for two months in 2007 were collected for her book An Introvert in Paris: Tips, Lists, and Essays for the Quiet Traveler. She is now single and makes her creative home in suburban Salt Lake City, Utah.
In addition to her teaching, music, and writing careers, Kathy paints large acrylic canvases of women reading, coffee drinkers in Paris, musicians, Rudolph Valentino, women with flowers, and scenes of the Arab world. She exhibited two one-woman shows in 2007, and three solo exhibits in 2010: at the Sandy Library in January, the Tin Angel Cafe in February, and the Chapman Library in June and July. Please see the “Images” section of this site for examples of her paintings, cartoons, and photographs.