The Writing Me

Kim Fay is the author of the USA Today-bestselling Kate & Frida, the instant National Bestseller Love & Saffron, and The Map of Lost Memories, an Edgar Award Finalist for Best First Novel. She has also written a food memoir, Communion: A Culinary Journey Through Vietnam. She created and served as the series editor for the innovative To Asia With Love guidebooks, and was a Hotel and Travel Editor for the travel, food, and lifestyle website, Gayot.com, for thirteen years. She is currently the Managing Editor for The Animation Guild's Keyframe magazine and website.

The Community Me

For more than twenty years, Kim served as a volunteer at Alexandria House, a residence for women and children transitioning from homelessness to permanent housing. Alexandria House also serves as a neighborhood center, and Kim played an integral role in the neighborhood grade school and teen programs. She spent five years leading the weekly Power of the Word writing workshop for teens, and she currently leads a monthly writing workshop for Alexandria House past residents. She also works with the women individually on book projects such as Keanakay Scott’s memoir of foster care and homelessness, Viewer's Discretion Advised, and Gigi Breland’s forthcoming Minus Tide, about her wrongful incarceration. Kim is a two-time recipient of the President's Volunteer Service Award for her work at Alexandria House through the National Council of Jewish Women Los Angeles.

The Personal Me

Kim was born in Seattle and spent her childhood writing Nancy Drew knockoffs in various small towns throughout Washington State. Her dream job as a kid? A mystery solving Pinky Tuscadero. After graduating from college and working for five years as an independent bookseller at the Elliott Bay Book Company, she moved to Vietnam in the mid-1990s. She fell in love with the country and lived in Saigon for four years, traveling back regularly once she left. She currently resides in Los Angeles with her husband, musician Jim Vitale, and their very spoiled dog, Mabel. 

What’s Next

Kim is writing (as always) half a dozen books at once! Up next is a third novel to round out the Love & Saffron and Kate & Frida trilogy. Taking place nearer the present day, it follows Joan in her eighties and Kate and Frida in their fifties as they explore middle-age, aging, community, friendship, family, memories, and of course—food! She is also working on small, quiet novel about her family history and her dad’s 1950’s childhood in the small Washington town of Carnation. Then there is her mystery series set in L.A. in the 1970s, and a middle grade adventure novel in which the daughter of Mexican and El Salvadoran immigrants discovers her secret superpower: empathy!