Kim Michele Richardson

Kim Michele Richardson was born in northern Kentucky in 1957. In 1960, when she was three years old, her mother was declared an unfit parent. The state of Kentucky took Richardson and her three older sisters from their home, placing them in the Saint Thomas Saint Vincent Orphan Asylum, which was run by the Catholic Church. Richardson and her sisters spent seven years in the orphanage, during which time they suffered emotional, physical, and sexual abuse at the hands of the nuns and priests who ran the institution. When Richardson was 10, she and her sisters returned to their mother’s care. In 2004, she and one of her sisters were involved in a class-action lawsuit brought on behalf of former orphanage residents who were abused. This experience prompted her to write and publish her first book, a memoir called The Unbreakable Child, in 2009. Richardson then turned to historical fiction with a local focus on Kentucky stories.