Born on Staten Island, New York, to a French-Irish mother and an Iroquois father, Ki Longfellow grew up in Marin County, California, but ended up living in France and England for many years. She is the widow of a British national treasure, Vivian Stanshall, who dreamed her name was Ki. As Ki Longfellow-Stanshall, she created the Thekla, a 180 foot Baltic Trader, to Bristol, England where it became the Old Profanity Showboat. It remains there today as a Bristol landmark. On it, she and Vivian wrote and staged a unique musical, "Stinkfoot, a Comic Opera," garnered a host of delighted, if slightly puzzled, national reviews. Her first book, "China Blues," now republished, was the subject of a… bidding war. "China Blues," and her second novel, "Chasing Women," introduced Longfellow to Hollywood... a long hard, but ultimately fascinating, trip. When Vivian died, Ki stopped writing. Living on Standing Room Only Farm in Vermont, time did not heal, but it tempered. Eventually Ki began writing again. She chose to explore the figure of Mary Magdalene in her novel "The Secret Magdalene." Nancy Savoca, a brilliant independent film maker (winner of the Sundance Grand Jury Prize with her first film, "True Love") traveled all the way to Vermont to option the book as her next film. Ki's second book about personal divinity is "Flow Down Like Silver," a novel about the numinous and gifted Hypatia of Alexandria, a tragically ignored woman of towering intellect who searched through that intellect for what Mary Magdalene knew in her heart. "Houdini Heart," Longfellow's first book of psychological horror is a stunning departure from her usual work. "Houdini Heart" has been favorably compared to the works of Shirley Jackson and H.P. Lovecraft. In 2013, Ki released her first three Sam Russo, Private Eye, noir murder mysteries ("Shadow Roll," "Good Dog, Bad Dog," & "The Girl in the Next Room," as well as "Walks Away Woman," a tale of one ordinary woman's ordeal as she stuggles to survive in the Sonoran Desert with a pair of nail clippers, a bottle of Valium, and a donkey.