Kate Woods

Kate Woods lives on the outskirts of an abandoned California ghost town called New Idria. Throughout the 1800s and early 1900s, the mining district was one of the northern hemisphere's biggest producers of liquid mercury. The area is now a deserted and dilapidated vision of days of yore, a snapshot out of a time warp in the Twilight Zone. It's legacy: a filthy neon-orange watershed of acid mine drainage that runs all the way to the San Francisco Bay Area during the flooding season, allowing all Californians to share in the poisonous havoc that mercury and heavy metals wreck upon living organisms. Be careful when you eat that next crab dinner!

It is in this bizarre, high desert setting where Kate writes freelanced stories and articles as they come, while finishing her work on a "ficticious" novel titled Quicksilver Chronicles, a journey into ten years of the lives of her and her family as they battle the goofy environment of New Idria.

For nine years during the late 1990s, until 2006, Kate was the senior staff writer for The Pinnacle newspaper based in Hollister, CA. Her beats included local government, politics and the environment. During her tenure, she won seven California Newspaper Publishing Association awards, five of them First Place in the areas of investigative and environmental reporting. She also one First Place for her satirical popular column called "Report from The Badlands."

In between writing gigs, Kate also creates commissioned art works specializing in animal portraits, in the mediums of pastel, beads and doo-dads.