Katy Dang was born on Valentine’s Day, 1969. She was raised in Sierra Madre, California, and graduated from Pasadena High School in 1987. She attended the University of California, Santa Cruz, spending her junior year studying at University College, Cork, Ireland, and earning her BA with a major in History and a minor in English Literature.

She moved to San Francisco and then Oakland after college, working in Berkeley as a fundraiser for Medical Aid for El Salvador and the San Francisco AIDS Foundation. She became the Accounts Manager for REAL Skateboards and Deluxe Distribution in San Francisco. During this time she met her life’s comrade, Nathan, who was a bike messenger and photographer.

Katy moved to the East Coast in 1994 and lived in New York and Boston before heading back out West to Colorado, where she and Nathan lived in Fairplay for 4 years. While there, she worked as a waitress at the Historic Fairplay Hotel, a bartender at the Park Bar, and as the sole employee of Uncle John’s Far Out Food for Far Away Places. She returned to California to attend graduate school at Sonoma State University, where she obtained her MFA in European Intellectual History. Her thesis, “’Romantic Ireland’s Dead and Gone;’ A Study of Irish Historiography through the Writings of T.W. Moody, Conor Cruise O’Brien, and F.S.L. Lyons,” was published in 1999. After graduating, she was the Executive Director of the Sonoma County Book Fair (later Festival), coordinator of the Jail Arts Program for the Sonoma County Arts Council, a founding member of the Literary Arts Guild, and library technician at the Herold Mahoney Library.

In 2002, Katy and Nathan moved to Boise, Idaho. She became blood mother to their son, Deuce, in 2006. She started writing professionally, first with Boise Weekly and then as the editor of Idaho Arts Quarterly Magazine, which she completely re-designed. She began contributing to Rocker Magazine in 2011. She has worked as the Executive Director for non-profit professional and arts organizations and serves on the Public Library Foundation Board.

A dissident, social critic and rebel since the mid-1980s, Katy’s work reflects a core understanding of the importance of critical questioning in the pursuit of truth through creative expression.