Stories that blaze their own trails.
The art and writing of Katy L. Wood.
A Fire Next Door
Disaster & Social Media
A Fire Next Door
Adult Nonfiction
#Nonfiction, #Social Media, #Natural Disasters, #Wildfire, #Colorado,
An exploration of our relationship to social media during natural disasters and how social media has changed the way we communicate about such disasters. Told through the lens of growing up in Colorado as the fire seasons have become worse and worse at the same pace at which social media has grown in use.
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Katy L. Wood is the author of several self-published books and comics including Poison in the Blood and The Pits, both fantasy adventure stories. She has worked in social media marketing for the last decade in some form or fashion and, like most millennials, started using it in general from a very young age. She also works in education, primarily hosting workshops for Girl Scouts to earn various creative badges, and she designed and taught a year-long creative writing course for students at an alternative High School. She has a bachelor’s degree in Illustration with a focus in Sequential Art (comics) From Rocky Mountain College of Art and Design, and is going back to school to get a degree in Wildland Fire Management at Western Mesa University.
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Repped by Sara Megibow at K.T. Literary.
Katy's Fire Related Work
Evacuation Prep Poster
This poster was created to help clarify the different levels of evacuation preparation that people should undertake and what they should grab based on the amount of time they have to evacuate. While it is primarily based around wildfire evacuation, it can apply to most disasters.
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All icons were illustrated by Katy L. Wood. It is the first in a planned series of disaster preparation posters aimed at diversifying disaster preparation information.
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This poster is available as prints both retail and wholesale, and the design is available for licensing. You can purchase prints in her shop, and if you would like to discuss wholesale or licensing options head to the contact page to send a message.
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You can view a larger size of the poster in Katy's Portfolio.
Wildfire Watercolors
After the East Troublesome Fire tore through her home county in the late summer of 2020, Katy wanted to do something to help support the local fire departments. In the end, she settled on creating a series of illustrations to help raise money via the sale of prints. She gathered charcoal from the fire and, with the addition of local honey and several other ingredients, used it to make watercolor paint that she then used to create a series of five illustrations. Each illustration features an animal and landscape from Grand County.
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To date, the watercolors have raised roughly $5,000 for Grand County Fire Departments. She also used the paint to create a mural in the same style for the Granby Mural Festival in 2021.
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Prints of these artworks can be found in her shop. You can learn more about each one here.
Lie Down in the Ashes
Lie Down in the Ashes is a fictional epistolary Young Adult Novel. It is based heavily around the wildfires that burned in Grand County, Colorado, over the summer and fall of 2020.
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The book is represented by Sara Megibow of KT Literary. You can learn more about it here.
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*This cover is unofficial and was created as a portfolio piece.
Katy's Social Media Related Work
Katy has worked in various social media related roles over the years, including doing marketing for her own work. She is familiar with various platforms including Twitter, Tumblr, TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, and others. Projects she has been involved in include:
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🔥 Working with Triebold Paleontology to build their social media and marketing presence from scratch for multiple aspects of the business including the DeepTime and Dinosaur Sanctuary branches.
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🔥 Organizing influencer campaigns.
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🔥 Launching products.
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🔥 Promoting Kickstarters.
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🔥 Covering the Colorado 2020 fires.
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🔥 Covering the Marshall Fire in 2021.
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🔥 Live event coverage of events such as conferences and conventions.
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🔥 Paid advertising.
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🔥 The creation and distribution of educational resources.
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