About Me

Kimberley D. Tait was born in 1958, in St. Catharines, Ontario, Canada, along with her twin sister, Patricia. She spent the better part of her childhood living in Port Dalhousie, only steps away from Lake Ontario. Her playground was the shores of this Great Lake, where she fished and swam and generally absorbed the environment into her soul. Some of Kimberley’s earliest memories consist of waking up on a summer morning to the sound of foghorns blaring through the mists and the smell of fish pervading her senses.

  In 1963, Kimberley’s father–chasing a dream of working somewhere sunny–moved the whole family to San Jose, California. She lived there for over a year before her mother decided she’d had enough of the nomadic life and insisted they head back to Canada.

  Life settled down after that, and Kimberley plodded her way through grade school, first at McArthur Public School, in Port Dalhousie, and then to Gracefield Public School. The one bright spot in the dull canvas of school was the opportunity to write stories, and it was there that she excelled beyond her own expectations.

  Kimberley became infatuated with horses at a very early age and dreamt of owning her own horse every single day of her life. Together with her twin sister, they wore their parents down over time, and the two sisters started taking riding lessons at Silver Acres Riding Academy. Kimberley has fond memories of this establishment, and it was there that she was finally able to realize her dream of owning a horse of her own. Her parents had been divorced by then, and the new man in her mother’s life bought them an American Saddlebred mare, named Duchess.

  After graduating high school, Kimberley did time at Humber College in their Equine Studies program. Following this, she went to work at Flamborough Downs Racetrack. Deciding that the racetrack life wasn’t for her, she moved into dressage horses, where she would spend the next few decades of her life firmly entrenched in the world of horse shows, lessons with Olympic caliber instructors, and training her Trakhener/Thoroughbred mare to Prix St. Georges level.

  Along with her love of horses, came the writer’s bug, and she was bitten hard.  She began to read voraciously, enjoying the likes of Dick Francis, and Jilly Cooper, and an idea came to her that she should start to write a book herself.  She had enough knowledge of horses to fill ten tomes, but it became very apparent that her writing skills needed work.  Kimberley enrolled in a short story course, offered by a local college in Guelph, where she was taught how to show and not tell, and that’s when her writing really took off. 

  Kimberley started writing A Dangerous Ride, and self-published the novel in the early 2000’s, with Trafford Publishing.  Since then, she has written several novels, the bulk of which spent years in bags in a drawer and only now are coming out of hiding, revealing themselves like moles poking their noses out of the dirt and blinking in the sunlight.

  A History of Lightning is the result of a culmination of all those years sitting in front of a computer and flexing her imagination into something tangible.

     As her career with horses is winding down, Kimberley now spends most of her time writing, and she is looking forward to the next phase of her life—as a published author, who still dreams about horses and never lost the nerve to try.