Now that I'm officially "retired" from the library, I'm getting around to doing a few things like updating my author page. Other wonderful stories have also come to me over the years and I hope to distill and write them down too before my age catches up with me or family life completely overwhelms me again:
"Karen E. Black lives in Toronto, Canada. Her debut novel about the Devereux cousins "From the Chrysalis" begged for a sequel, so she wrote "Feeling for the Air" about Dace's escape from a corrupt penitentiary system and his dual mission to clear his name and find out where the Canadian monarch butterflies really made their winter home.
In January 2016, she finally visited Michoacán, Mexico and saw the monarchs' wintering grounds for herself. At the El Rosario colony, high up in the rugged forested mountains, millions of monarchs colored the oyamel trees orange and bent their branches under their collective weight. Black's timing seemed perfect. She could still get on a horse. Also, the monarchs, long threatened by illegal logging, the use of pesticides and the eradication of milkweed, had made a big comeback. However, six weeks later, at least 1.5 million monarch butterflies were hit with a deadly freeze as an unusual ice and wind storm moved through the monarchs' wintering grounds in the Michoacán mountains. The storm hit just as the spring migration to Canada was beginning. Luckily, many butterflies had exited the mountains before the unexpected freeze.
Black is currently working on the the last novel in the Devereux Trilogy,"Take to the Sky" which is set mostly in Toronto. This book also takes its title from the same Emily Dickinson poem as the first two books in this trilogy.
Black did her Master's in Library Science at the University of Toronto (because she loved books and research) and completed several certificates at the Institute for Genealogical Studies (because she also loved family history), but she did her undergraduate degree in sociology with a minor in English at the University of Western Ontario. Though Black's first love was and always will be English literature, she is grateful for the insight she gained into social problems, human social relationships and institutions when she studied sociology."
