About Katie Silverwings
Katie Silverwings has always been a creature of words and art.
As a child, she was homeschooled on the family farm in northwestern Texas. She spent most of her free time reading and experimenting with every art or craft medium she could find. She developed a life-long love of nature and history as well from her books and the hours she spent exploring the farm with her younger brother.
By the time Silverwings graduated with her high school diploma, she had begun writing short stories and the first draft of her as-yet-unpublished novel, The Keykeeper. She had also developed skills in traditional handcrafts such as patchwork, knitting, crochet, and beadwork.
Silverwings attended McMurry University in Abilene, Texas, where she found herself pursuing her degree across several different departments. She ultimately graduated with her BA in 2015 as a double major in History and English with minors in Art, Arts Administration, and Biblical Greek. She won several awards for her work in student art shows during her time at McMurry, and was awarded departmental honors in English for her senior opus project: the revised draft of The Keykeeper. She also won two awards for the paper she wrote as a senior student in the History department which drew on her original research into the history of quiltmaking in northwestern Texas.
A series of odd coincidences and events sent Silverwings first to Memphis, Tennessee, to work on an embroidered art quilt for the Westberg Institute for Faith Community Nursing, and then all the way across the Atlantic to pursue a second undergraduate degree at the University for the Creative Arts in the UK. Silverwings herself still isn’t quite sure how things lined up that way, but she was delighted to take the opportunity when it appeared.
During her time at UCA, Silverwings was a student in the Glass, Ceramics, Jewellery, and Metalwork program at the university’s Farnham campus. While she had the chance to develop skills across all four areas of study, her area of focus was ultimately in glass, specifically freehand glassblowing. For her senior project, she revisited her longstanding obsession with historical quiltmaking and began producing a body of work incorporating both blown glass and patchwork. She was fortunate to have use of UCA Farnham’s textile facilities for this project as well, and dyed all of the fabric she was working with herself. During her final year of study, she also worked part-time in the glassblowing studio of her mentor, Adam Aaronson.
Silverwings graduated from UCA in the spring of 2020, having spent the final months of her degree alone due to the COVID-19 lockdown in her flat in Farnham and sewing long patchwork banners on her hand-crank sewing machine. She also started writing again, seeking to create stories of positivity and connection in the face of a world which now is all too often shown to us as dark and lonely. The Strange Space series of stories began to take shape during this time.
In 2021, having returned to the USA, Silverwings both resumed her post as the Artist in Residence of the Westberg Institute for Faith Community Nursing and spent several months in St. Petersburg, Florida, studying the techniques of flameworked glass at ZenGlass studio.
Silverwings released her first self-published book, Feathered Friendship: A Strange Space Novella in May, 2022. Her second book, Celadon: A Strange Space Novel, comes out in November, 2022.
Silverwings is a wanderer by nature, and has returned to keeping her nest somewhere in the vicinity of Memphis, Tennessee, where she is in the process of putting together a studio she can take with her wherever she happens to wander next. She is also still writing, with far too much assistance from the two cats who live in her studio space. One of said cats is best described as a small cloud of fuzzy dark matter with eyes, and likes to sleep holding her arm while she is typing. The other cat is an operatic calico who takes offense at the existence of doors.
Silverwings identifies as aromantic, asexual, and genderfae; “she/her,” “they/them,” and “fae/faer” pronouns are all welcome.
