Kimberley Snow
author of
It Changes
Kimberley Snow grew up in Greenwood, South Carolina, and has lived in a number of places including North Dakota and North Carolina where she worked with J.B. Rhine at Duke University's Department of Parapsychology. She worked her way through graduate school as a chef, eventually becoming executive chef at the Kentucky Horse Center in Lexington, Ky. After completing a Ph.D. from the University of Kentucky, she took a job teaching in the English Department at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where she helped to found the Women's Studies Program. Two of her books, Writing Yourself Home and Keys to the Open Gate (Conari) grew out of her involvement with Women's Studies. Over time she moved on to teach other classes at UCSB: Writing, Science Fiction, Women's Science Fiction, and, in 2003, "The Art of Peace."
Her play, Multiple , won first prize in the 1986 Jacksonville University 17th Annual Playwrighting Contest. Dragon Soup & Other Intense Sensations, a play about restaurant life, was produced at The Mandalay restaurant in Santa Barbara which served the same meal being prepared in the play.
In early 1991, she and her late husband, the poet Barry Spacks, moved to a Tibetan Buddhist community in Northern California where she spent the next six years studying with Chagdud Tulku Rinpoche, working in the kitchen, setting up a website for the community, and editing dharma books.
Her best-selling memoir, In Buddha's Kitchen, Cooking, Being Cooked, and other Adventures in a Retreat Center, (Shambhala, 2003) chronicles her life as a chef in a Tibetan Gonpa. It has been translated into Spanish, Korean and Chinese.
Keys to the Open Gate: A Woman's Spirituality Sourcebookwas reprinted in 2018.
Since returning to Santa Barbara in 2005, she has worked with the Vairotsana Foundation, served as the Program Director for the Santa Barbara Institute for Consciousness Studies, founded by Alan Wallace for five years, and now the organizer for the Odiyana Foundation, headed by Tulku Orgyen Phuntsok. She lives in Santa Barbara, CA. where she leads workshops and retreats which combine writing and meditation.