Katherine Maxfield

Photo by Jose Morales, Xinia Productions
Born into an Air Force family, Katherine lived in fourteen homes and attended seven schools by age 18. She resumed bouncing around after college, until settling in Silicon Valley. She and her husband have lived in the same home for over 25 years.

Katherine graduated cum laude with a BA in economics from Ohio University, has an MBA (marketing) from Santa Clara University, and an MFA (writing)  from St. Mary’s College of California.

Starting Up Silicon Valley: How ROLM Became a Cultural Icon and Fortune 500 Company, her first non-fiction book, (Greenleaf 2014) received a starred review from Kirkus and was an Eric Hoffer Award winner. Her short stories, published in literary journals, deal with interpersonal relationships, whether set around negotiations to buy an exotic tree or murder/suicide. Her personal perspective non-fiction has appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle.

Before Silicon Valley, Katherine was a bank economics analyst in Arizona, a second-grade teacher in Mississippi and Maine, and a realtor in Utah. In technology, she worked in market research, product marketing, and management for ComQuest, TRW Vidar, ROLM Corporation, and BusinessLand—leaping from a GPW (great place to work) into an APW (awful place to work.) She consulted in marketing and distribution for tech firms like Polycom, Apple, 3Com, and many more.

She began writing after leaving the corporate world in the 2002 and began Terry-Gross-style conversations with authors at Montalvo Arts Center in 2014.