I was born and raised in the Ozark mountains of Arkansas, where my family goes back for generations beyond memory. I left Arkansas when I was 18, learned to live a life of always being a cultural outsider, and now live most of the year in Pietrasanta, Italy. In between, I dropped out of Harvard and then dropped back in, had two sons on my own, tended bar in the best underground blues club in North Carolina, got a Ph.D., lived for a year in a haunted house on a tiny island in the South Pacific, finally found the love of my life, and began writing books. For many years, I was a professor of sociology at Colorado College and published a lot of academic writing, including three books: Collective Creativity: Art and Society in the South Pacific, Communities and Networks: Using Social Network Analysis to Re-think Urban and Community Studies, and Outrage: The Arts and The Creation of Modernity. You can see my TED talk about my South Pacific research on my website at http://KathyGiuffre.com (my other social media links are there as well). Because of my scholarly work on community building, I am frequently interviewed in the general press, including, for example, The Atlantic and The New York Times. In addition to a memoir based on my time in the South Pacific (An Afternoon in Summer: My Year on a South Sea Island), I also published one novel, The Drunken Spelunker’s Guide to Plato (Blair 2015), which won the Seven Sister’s Book Award for fiction, was a Southern Independent Bookseller’s Alliance “Okra Pick” for Best Books of Summer 2015, was a finalist for Foreward’s Indiefab Book of the Year for Literary Fiction, and was long-listed for other awards.