Kelley Powell

Once upon a time there was girl named Kelley. Kelley was terrified of the math centre in her grade school classroom, but man, that creative writing centre made her smile. In her spare time she wrote stories - lots of stories – about rainbows and ghosts and horses named Frankie Hoof Powell. As she grew, she came to believe that being a writer was pretty much impossible, so she decided to do other things. She went to Indonesia and lived in a one-room hut with a family of 6 villagers and accidentally dropped her sarong while bathing in the village river. She got mistaken for a drag queen while teaching English in South Korea; chased monkeys away from children while volunteering in India; and got tricked into marriage in Laos. Kelley was still allergic to math, but she studied stuff anyway - politics at Queen's University and international development at the University of Guelph. She became a yoga and meditation instructor too. Still, something was missing. It wasn’t until Kelley had three small children and no time to write that she decided to get serious about stories again. The result is The Merit Birds, her debut novel, coming from Dundurn Press in May 2015. Please read it. Please like it. Frankie Hoof Powell does.