About Kathleen

Kathleen S. Schmitt spent three years in El Salvador, working directly with people of all ages who are members of the parish of Santisima Trinidad, the Episcopal Church of El Salvador. The church is located in San Martin just outside of San Salvador.

In the 1970s, Kathleen and her spouse Ed adopted two indigenous children in Canada before they discovered what was called the “60’s Scoop”, a federal plan to remove indigenous children from their families to assimilate them into the dominant culture of the land. While the Schmitts had not specifically requested indigenous children, over time, they learned a great deal about the indigenous people’s situation in Canada and saw that they had been co-opted into that program. At this time, their daughter lives in a mountain community of British Columbia where she works as a counsellor. Their son who suffered from multiple sclerosis passed away due to complications with Covid in 2021.

Kathleen also gained insights about indigenous peoples and their struggles in other parts of the world, particularly Central America. This interest later led the Schmitts to El Salvador. Seeing that representing the minds of Salvadoran people would be difficult for a non-Salvadoran, Kathleen created the identity of her protagonist Hildie as half-Salvadoran with a European Canadian mother. Growing up in Canada with her maternal uncle, therefore, Hildie would have a European identity while suffering rejection from many of her peers because of her skin colour and indigenous heritage. Writing about racism in Canada was not difficult, as the author saw how racism affected her children and many others.

Kathleen is working on two sequels to Getting a Life—Finding Jaguar Woman and Issues of Trust, which will become the trilogy called Hildie’s Quest.

Kathleen’s novel, Magnificat: Song of Justice, also based on Central America, will be published by Inanna Publications in Toronto, Canada in the spring of 2024.

Kathleen served for twenty years as a priest in the Anglican Church of Canada in the dioceses of Edmonton, New Westminster (Vancouver), El Salvador, and Rupertsland (Manitoba). She gained her B.A. and Master of Divinity degrees in Texas and later completed her Doctor of Ministry degree in Edmonton, Alberta. She and Ed live in Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada.