Katy Hammel

A chance visit to Bookworks bookstore in Albuquerque tipped Katy off to National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) and she wrote her first novel in 2012. The next year she began showing her elementary school students how to write novels. Katy and her student writers were featured in a November, 2013 article in Albuquerque: The Magazine (Vol. 10, No. 7 pp. 38-39). At this point, there are more than 30 published student novels originally drafted in her classroom. Katy prides herself in nurturing student creativity, courage, and identity as New Mexicans and Americans. Themes of belonging, intelligence, and moral courage appear throughout her fiction writing. Katy Hammel was born in Japan, the daughter and grand-daughter of American Protestant missionaries. As a child, she traveled the world with her family, but she always knew she was an American girl and she longed to live in the USA. Having grown up in a country as densely populated as Japan, Katy was particularly drawn to the wide-open spaces of the American west. After finishing her undergraduate degree at Yale University, working as a foster care and adoption social worker in Brooklyn, New York and then as a government issues analyst at GE’s corporate headquarters in Fairfield, Connecticut, Katy headed west. She settled in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and began a fruitful career as a plaintiffs’ civil rights lawyer. In 1998, she was named the ACLU-New Mexico’s Attorney of the Year. Katy met her husband in law school and they are raising two boys. As the children grew, Katy changed direction and became a public school teacher for children with giftedness and other learning exceptionalities. She achieved National Board Certification as a teacher in 2013 and was selected as Teacher of the Year by the New Mexico Association for the Gifted. Now Katy works as an Assistant Principal at one of the largest public high schools in New Mexico. Katy continues to be involved in several local and state-wide organizations that host activities and competitions for New Mexico’s young people.