Kitty CostelloKitty Costello is descended mostly from potato-famine refugees who fled Ireland in the 1860s. Farmers, teachers, herdsmen, machinists, coal miners--they settled mainly in the Midwest, in Ohio and South Dakota, where her parents were born. Costello wa born in Washington, DC. Her earliest years were spent in rural Maryland on the grounds of an institution where her social-worker father took care of people with extreme physical and mental disabilities. She was schooled by the Sisters of Notre Dame at Catholic University's grade school in DC. Then public school rounded out her education, as did the upheavals and uprisings of the civil rights and anti-war movements in the 1960s and '70s. Moving to San Francisco in 1977, she worked for thirty years for the San Francisco Public Library, while also practicing Shaolin kung fu and working as a teacher, an editor, and a social justice organizer. She earned a master's degree in social psychology, specializing in labor and mental health, and in recovery from trauma. She currently has a small psychotherapy practice and leads meditation, writing and tai chi classes. Ongoing participation in local writing communities has been essential to her writer's journey and sparked many of her most cherished lifetime friendships. She is literary trustee for native Alaskan writer Mary TallMountain. She created a library archive for the 70-year-old San Francisco Writers Workshop, and she is writing a history of that group. Working with Freedom Voices, she has helped give voice to marginalized writers and artists, especially in San Francisco's Tenderloin District, for nearly thirty years. Costello lives with her husband and three cats in San Francisco's Mission District. This is her first collection of poetry. Read More Read Less