"I want people to know who they are by knowing who I am."

After seventeen years of vocal training, five years of experimentation in rhythm guitar, and four years of original songwriting, solo artist Kate Brown arrived on the rainy shores of Seattle. The refinement and spontaneity of her lively antics and warm comedic moments are found between the lingering notes of her "urban folk" style. In regards to this newcomer who performed in this summer's Mae West Fest, the Seattle Post Intelligencer raved about her "hard driving and robust vocal style ... blast[ing] pain away with explosive tunes and lyrics." The Seattle Times chimed in as she "cheerfully warm[ed] things up", and The Stranger carefully labeled her work as "catchy tunes, earnestly performed."

Design...........Bradley Bishop
Photography.............David Perez

With performance art training from New York's Marymount Manhattan College and Seattle's Cornish College of the Arts, Kate presents dramatic contrasts of mood and vivacity within each show, balancing the angst and bite of certain songs with the beauty and serenity of others. Her formal performance experience includes a series of commissioned appearances at private parties in Manhattan's Greenwich Village; a 250 seat sold out concert at Northland College in Ashland, Wisconsin; a leading role in the 1999 award winning Seattle Fringe Festival recording and musical production Rock Opera: The Fossil Record; leading roles in the musicals Nine and I Used to Dream in Spanish at Cornish College of the Arts; and live performances in the Seattle circuit which include the Wild Rose, the Pike Place Market, and the Rainbow Bar and Grill.

Photo by David Perez

Poetry, by Kate Brown:

"An obelisk commemorates the sight where I was first touched, for they are one in the same. I still smell it, like new blood in a house where brothers should have been born. Just above the hem of the thighs, old forgiveness in a pact with selfishness. It's a reoccurring theme in my stories a tight little life set to music, balanced by rhythm, offset by insecurity. Oh heavenly father, forgive me, for I have sinned.I've made my mother cry... I'll do it again."

Design...........Bradley Bishop
Photography.............David Perez

Poetry Continued, by Kate Brown:

"She is drawing it out of me without even asking, a parting of mind and soul, imagination and forgiveness, a face as sweet as death as mourning, behind eyes that question and know they do not receive truth. Only quiet, only shadows in boxes that are unopened or forgotten, like pain in painful. Christmas, like a celebration is salvation, and the savior is the feet that are bent, but are not broken, and can continue for the sake of knowledge, which is truth, which is art, which does not exist, but only in her mind, and mine."

Photo by David Perez

Poetry Continued, by Kate Brown:

"Hot like a burn on flesh that cannot be contained, and in vain, I explain, that the blood is not justice, but forgiveness, and relief. Take it in the dark before the thief. My eyes are cloudy and my fingernails drip red like the bed we fold up from the floor to the sideboard. We wait, wait frozen, like children, like mothers like preachers who teach her, till someone unfolds us again, molds us again."