Albuquerque author Kate Horsley's latest book was set to be released this month, but it's been delayed until July. A lot of up-and-coming writers would be crushed by such a setback, but Horsley seems to take it in stride. She's already had three books published, the first of which, Crazy Woman, is considered a regional classic, and the second, A Killing in New Town, won her the 1996 Western States Book Award for fiction. Besides the book that's been delayed, she's got another book on the way, and recently she got a plug from Julia Roberts in O Magazine.

Horsley, however, claims she gets more satisfaction out of people telling her that they learned something from her books than she does from celebrities talking about her in magazines. Horsley doesn't even know how many copies of her most recent book, Confessions of a Pagan Nun, have been sold even though Shambhala Publications released a paperback version of the book because it's done so well. "I'm on to those authors who doesn't keep track of that. I focus on the writing aspect of it. That allows me to write what I feel is true, without compromising," Horsley said.

Horsley writes what J.B. Bryan of La Alameda Press calls "genre-breaking historical fiction." La Alameda published Crazy Woman (now in its third printing) about an Anglo woman from Virginia who moves to New Mexico and falls in love with the native culture, as well as the follow book, A Killing in New Town, which is set in Las Vegas, NM. Careless Love, the third in this trilogy, is due out in July, 2003, from UNM Press.

Horsley's interest in tribal cultures, particularly Native Americans, and their transformation as a result of contact with nontribal societies, has influenced her writing tremendously. But she doesn't always set her historical novels in the Americas. "I saw a lot of connections between tribal live and pre-Christian Ireland and I felt more of a right as a non-Native American to write about Irish tribal history than I did to write about Native American tribal history," Horsley said. So Horsley wrote about Irish tribes in Confessions of a Pagan Nun, which is about a pagan woman who, when forced to become Catholic, decides to become a nun.

Horsley traveled to Ireland four times to soak in the culture and the atmosphere. As a result, her novel truly makes the reader feel as if they are in sixth century Ireland experiencing the struggles the main character goes through as she wrestles with paganism versus Christianity. "I think these stores need to be out there for political reasons maybe, and they are stories I'd want to read."

Now in her 50's, Horsley began writing when she was in the firth grade. "My mother was the reason I wrote," she said. A painter, Horsley's mother exposed her to art, both visual and literary. "She gave me the sense that the artist is a shaman -- something holy, something that, if you have that calling, it is a calling to serve, it isn't a calling to inflate your ego. You have to take the calling seriously but not yourself. If you take yourself seriously as an artist, you've lost it."

In graduate school at UNM 25 years ago, Horsley wrote her Ph.D. dissertation about women from the East who came to New Mexico. The dissertation would change Horsley's life. While in North Carolina with her first husband, Horsley used the dissertation to write her first book. "I missed New Mexico so much that I wanted to be there somehow, so I wrote a novel set in New Mexico," she said.

After she returned to New Mexico three years later, Horsley began teaching at UNM, then at Albuquerque TVI where she has been for the last 15 years. At TVI, Horsley, who goes by Kate Parker, teaches English courses and a creative writing class where she brings her experience and knowledge about writing to her students.

"There are two reasons that I can't not teach. One is because if I don't have structure in my life, I begin to get weirder than I'm even comfortable with -- wearing the same clothes for four or five days, sleeping in them. The other reason is because I learn so much from my students. If I didn't have students I would thing that I knew more than I do. My students are constantly revealing to me how much there is that I don't know and that is really stimulating." Horsley doesn't plan on quitting teaching any time soon, but she's not going to let it get in the way of writing more books. "I definitely feel that I get better as I go along as a result of living life; observing, researching, reading more."

She likes writing historical fiction "because I can deal with things like the tragedies I have experienced in the context of another century and it's the same story." And Horsley is no stranger to tragedy. Her son, and only child, dies in an car accident in 2000 when he was 18. Since then she has set up an Aaron Parker Lockwood scholarship at TVI for students like her son who have their GED, are part-time students, are interested in what she calls "social ranting," and are pursuing majors like Political Science, English or Journalism. "My life and my work are dedicated to him" Horsley said.