Gwen Knighton
Pegasus Nominations |
|||
| Year |
Collaboration |
Category | Song |
| 2002 | w/ Three Weird Sisters | Best Performer | |
| 2002 | Best Writer/Composer | ||
| 2002 | Best Song That Tells A Story | Song of Fey Cross | |
Gwen Knighton's father loved Tolkein, chess, Heinlein, Nat King Cole, red-cockaded woodpeckers, Spike Jones, poetry, and making up stories and songs to tell his little girl at bedtime. Gwen grew up at chess tournaments, Audubon Society meetings, and the Augusta, Georgia public library.
Susan Cooper, Anne McCaffrey, Diana Wynne Jones, Sylvia Engdahl and Lloyd Alexander filled her days and nights to the exclusion of everything else, and sparked her desire to be a musician, a bard, a harper. She developed a healthy appreciation for Celtic music, learned a lot about ballads and folk songs and taught herself to play the guitar. However, the older Gwen got, the more she thought about harps and harping, and when she finally got her first wire harp in February of 1996, she stopped playing other instruments, grew her fingernails, and never looked back.
Tentatively, she began singing traditional songs and playing with a band called Rose, Thistle, and Thorn in Salem, Massachusetts, and through a series of unlikely events she now sings and plays her original material with Three Weird Sisters.
Since her first filk at Dragoncon in 1999, she's really found a home in the filk community. "I spent 30 years looking for the folk tradition," Gwen says. "Now I know it lives in the filk room."
In the last three years, she's made up for lost songwriting time and sets herself a goal of working on one new song every week and writing a song worth singing at least once a month (Atlanta housefilks are great incentive!).
Mundanely, Gwen has been a tech support geek, UNIX system administrator, regional manager, music teacher, technical writer, administrative assistant, and graphic artist. She now works as a legal assistant in a very busy law office, and she gets to work with friends and bandmates. She is recently divorced, has a beautiful son, and spends a lot of her copious free time taking care of cats, practicing, writing new songs, reading, and hanging out online.
If you want more information, Gwen's website is at http://www.gwenknighton.com.