Kim Goldberg is an award-winning poet, journalist and author. She has supported herself from her writing for more than thirty years. Her latest book is RED ZONE, a photo-illustrated poem diary of Nanaimo's homeless population.

Kim's issue-oriented writings on politics, environment and social justice have appeared in more than 2,000 articles published in Macleans, Canadian Geographic, Vancouver Sun, This Magazine, Georgia Straight, The Progressive and many other periodicals. She has written extensively on deforestation, Native rights, the 1990 car-bombing of forest activist Judi Bari, and US nuclear submarines at Nanoose Bay.

Her poems, fiction and graffiti-based art have appeared in dozens of literary magazines and anthologies around the world including The Capilano Review (Canada), Geist (Canada), The Dalhousie Review (Canada), Istanbul Literary Review (Turkey), The Arabesques Review (Algeria), Voices Israel (Israel), Stony Thursday Book (Ireland), Neon Highway (England), Cimarron Review (USA), Post Road (USA) and elsewhere.

In 2007, after a life-long career as an investigative journalist and nonfiction author, Kim released her first book of poetry, Ride Backwards On Dragon. In it, she maps her own tumultuous journey through eight years of writerly silence, Taoist mysticism and the secrets of internal alchemy using the 66-move structure of Liuhebafa - an ancient Chinese martial art that she practices. The book was short-listed for Canada's Gerald Lampert Memorial Award for poetry.

She followed that up in 2009 with RED ZONE, her graffiti-strewn verse map of homelessness in Nanaimo. RED ZONE was so successful that it went into a second printing after just seven weeks and has now been adopted as a literature course text at Vancouver Island University.

Born and raised in Oregon, with a biology degree from University of Oregon, Kim came to Canada with her family during the Vietnam War years. She has lived in Nanaimo ever since. In 2008, Kim began creating "Poem Galleries" in vacant downtown storefronts, papering derelict windows with poems by local poets. She participates annually in Random Acts of Poetry - a nationwide literacy initiative in which poets spend a week reading poems to strangers and giving away free books.

Kim has organized coffeehouses and other Nanaimo events for Poets Against War and for Writers Against the War. She is a frequent performer at Wordstorm and other spoken word events on Vancouver Island. Kim also co-hosts "Urban Poetry Café" on Nanaimo's Radio CHLY, reading poems from Guantánamo detainees, the Cuban Five, Iraqi and Palestinian poets and other marginalized voices. And she creates hand-built book-art objects from tree bark, tarpaper, candy wrappers and whatever else she finds lying around downtown Nanaimo.

She is a popular classroom speaker, and she offers classroom presentations and public workshops on many writing-related subjects including:

• How to Make a Living as A Writer
• The Art of Hand-Made Books
• Letting the Poetry Lead You
• Pushing Boat with Flow of Water: Writing the Liuhebafa Way
• Writing From Personal Experience
• Writing On Social Issues: Is Poetry the New Journalism?
• The Ins and Outs of Self-Publishing
• Say It With Weathergrams