Kimberley Snow grew up in Greenwood, South Carolina, and has since lived in a number of places including North Dakota and North Carolina where she was a researcher for 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 grew out of her involvement with Women’s Studies. They are available on Kindle. 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 Playwriting Contest. Dragon Soup & Other Intense Sensations, a play about restaurant life, was produced at The Mandalay restaurant in Santa Barbara, CA, which served the same meal being prepared in the play. The play ran for six weeks.
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 Dzogchen with Chagdud Tulku Rinpoche, working in the kitchen, setting up a website for the community, and editing dharma books. Her memoir, In Buddha’s Kitchen: Cooking, Being Cooked and Other Adventures in a Retreat Center (Shambhala Publications) is based on her experiences of being a chef at Chagdud Gonpa. Published in both hard and soft cover, the book has been translated into Spanish, Korean and Chinese (twice!).
In 2005 she became one of the coordinators of the Vairotsana Foundation, Santa Barbara, fundraising for the retreat land Pema Kod, organizing workshops and events. From 2007 to 2012, she served as the Program Director for Santa Barbara Institute for Consciousness Studies, founded by B. Alan Wallace.
She now coordinates events and leads workshops for Odiyana Institute, headed by Tulku Orgyen Phuntsok. In addition to the series of dharma workshops and Study Groups she led through SBI, she taught month-long beginning and advanced “Cultivating Emotional Balance through Mindfulness” for four years with Dr. Radhule Weininger at La Casa de Maria. Since the publication of Writing Yourself Awake: Meditation & Creativity, she has led a number of popular workshops and weekend retreats which combine writing and meditation. Her novel, It Changes, about a poet and a chef, was published by World Parade Books in late 2011, reprinted by Bluestone Books in 2018. Keys to the Open Gate: A Woman’s Spirituality Sourebook was reprinted in 2018; a website keystotheopengate.net provides excerpts and updated links. Both of these books are also available on Kindle. She lives, writes, and leads workshops in Santa Barbara, CA.
